Story of My Heart

7/31/2019 Story of My Heart

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THE STORY OF MY HEART

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

by RICHARD JEFFERIES



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CONTENTS

CHAPTER I ....................................................................3

CHAPTER II ................................................................10

CHAPTER III ...............................................................18

CHAPTER IV ...............................................................27

CHAPTER V .................................................................34

CHAPTER VI ...............................................................43

CHAPTER VII..............................................................53

CHAPTER VIII ............................................................59

CHAPTER IX ...............................................................64

CHAPTER X ................................................................71

CHAPTER XI ...............................................................78



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CHAPTER I

THE story of my heart commences seventeen years ago. In theglow of youth there were times every now and then when I felt

the necessity of a strong inspiration of soul thought. My heart was dusty, parched for want of the rain of deep feeling; my mind arid and dry, for there is a dust which settles on the heartas well as that which falls on a ledge. It is injurious to the mindas well as to the body to be always in one place and alwayssurrounded by the same circumstances. A species of thick clothing slowly grows about the mind, the pores are choked,little habits become a part of existence, and by degrees the mindis enclosed in a husk. When this began to form I felt eager toescape from it, to throw off the heavy clothing, to drink deeply once more at the fresh foundations of life. An inspiration, along deep breath of the pure air of thought, could alone givehealth to the heart.

There is a hill to which I used to resort at such periods. Thelabour of walking three miles to it, all the while gradually ascending, seemed to clear my blood of the heaviness

accumulated at home. On a warm summer day the slow continued rise required continual effort, which carried away thesense of oppression. The familiar everyday scene was soon outof sight; I came to other trees, meadows, and fields; I began tobreathe a new air and to have a fresher aspiration. I restrainedmy soul till reached the sward of the hill; psyche, the soul thatlonged to be loose. I would write psyche always instead of soulto avoid meanings which have become attached to the word

soul, but it is awkward to do so. Clumsy indeed are all wordsthe moment the wooden stage of commonplace life is left. Irestrained psyche, my soul, till I reached and put my foot on thegrass at the beginning of the green hill itself. Moving up thesweet short turf, at every step my heart seemed to obtain a

wider horizon of feeling; with every inhalation of rich pure air, adeeper desire. The very light of the sun was whiter and morebrilliant here. By the time I had reached the summit I hadentirely forgotten the petty circumstances and the annoyances





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sky, holding out my hand for the sunbeams to touch it, proneon the sward in token of deep reverence, thus I prayed that Imight touch to the unutterable existence infinitely higher thandeity.

With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intensecommunion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the starshidden by the light, with the ocean, in no manner can thethrilling depth of these feelings be written, with these I prayed,as if they were the keys of an instrument, of an organ, with

which I swelled forth the note of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power. The great sun burning with light; thestrong earth, dear earth; the warm sky; the pure air; the thought

of ocean; the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture,an ecstasy, and inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I prayed. Nextto myself I came and recalled myself, my bodily existence. Iheld out my hand, the sunlight gleamed on the skin and theiridescent nails; I recalled the mystery and beauty of the flesh. Ithought of the mind with which I could see the ocean sixty miles distant, and gather to myself its glory. I thought of my inner existence, that consciousness which is called the soul.

These, that is, myself, I threw into the balance to weight theprayer the heavier. My strength of body, mind and soul, I flung into it; I but forth my strength; I wrestled and laboured, andtoiled in might of prayer. The prayer, this soul-emotion was initself-not for an object-it was a passion. I hid my face in thegrass, I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I wasrapt and carried away.

Becoming calmer, I returned to myself and thought, reclining inrapt thought, full of aspiration, steeped to the lips of my soul indesire. I did not then define, or analyses, or understand this. Isee now that what I laboured for was soul-life, more soul-nature, to be exalted, to be full of soul-learning. Finally I rose,

walked half a mile or so along the summit of the hill eastwards,to soothe myself and come to the common ways of life again.Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he

would only have thought that I was resting a few minutes; I



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made no outward show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on within me as I reclinedthere! I was greatly exhausted when I reached home.

Occasionally I went upon the hill deliberately, deeming it goodto do so; then, again, this craving carried me away up there of itself. Though the principal feeling was the same, there were

variations in the mode in which it affected me.

Sometimes on lying down on the sward I first looked up at thesky, gazing for a long time till I could see deep into the azureand my eyes were full of the colour; then I turned my face tothe grass and thyme, placing my hands at each side of my face

so as to shut out everything and hide myself. Having drunk deeply of the heaven above and felt the most glorious beauty of the day, and remembering the old, old, sea, which (as it seemedto me) was but just yonder at the edge, I now became lost, andabsorbed into the being or existence of the universe. I feltdown deep into the earth under, and high above into the sky,and farther still to the sun and stars. Still farther beyond thestars into the hollow of space, and losing thus my separateness

of being came to seem like a part of the whole. Then I whisper-ed to the earth beneath, through the gr ass and thyme,down into the depth of its ear, and again up to the starry spacehid behind the blue of day. Travelling in an instant across thedistant sea, I saw as if with actual vision the palms andcocoanut trees, the bamboos of India, and the cedars of theextreme south. Like a lake with islands the ocean lay before me,as clear and vivid as the plain beneath in the midst of theamphitheatre of hills.

With the glory of the great sea, I said, with the firm, solid, andsustaining earth; the depth, distance, and expanse of ether; theage, timelessness, and ceaseless motion of the ocean; the stars,and the unknown in space; by all those things which are mostpowerful known to me, and by those which exist, but of whichI have no idea whatever, I pray. Further, by my own soul, thatsecret existence which above all other things bears the nearest



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resemblance to the ideal of spirit, infinitely nearer than earth,sun, or star. Speaking by an inclination towards, not in words,my soul prays that I may have something from each of these,that I may gather a flower from them, that I may have in myself the secret and meaning of the earth, the golden sun, the light,the foam-flecked sea. Let my soul become enlarged; I am notenough; I am little and contemptible. I desire a great-ness of soul, an irradiance of mind, a deeper insight, a broader hope.Give me power of soul, so that I may actually effect by its willthat which I strive for.

In winter, though I could not then rest on the grass, or stay long enough to form any definite expression, I still went up to

the hill once now and then, for it seemed that to merely visitthe spot repeated all that I had previously said. But it was notonly then.

In summer I went out into the fields, and let my soul inspirethese thoughts under the trees, standing against the trunk, orlooking up through the branches at the sky. If trees couldspeak, hundreds of them would say that I had had these soul-

emotions under them. Leaning against the oak's massive trunk,and feeling the rough bark and the lichen at my back, looking southwards over the grassy fields, cowslip-yellow, at the woodson the slope, I thought my desire of deeper soul-life. Or underthe green firs, looking upwards, the sky was more deeply blue attheir tops; then the brake fern was unroll- ing, the dovescooing, the thickets astir, the late ash-leaves coming forth.Under the shapely rounded elms, by the hawthorn bushes andhazel, everywhere the same deep desire for the soul-nature; tohave from all green things and from the sunlight the innermeaning which was not known to them, that I might be full of light as the woods of the sun's rays. Just to touch the lichenedbark of a tree, or the end of a spray projecting over the path asI walked, seemed to repeat the same prayer in me.

The long-lived summer days dried and warmed the turf in themeadows. I used to lie down in solitary corners at full length





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and more powerful than I could imagine. That I might takefrom all their energy, grandeur, and beauty, and gather it intome. That my soul might be more than the cosmos of life.

I prayed with the glowing clouds of sun-set and the soft light of the first star coming through the violet sky. At night with thestars, according to the season : now with the Pleiades, now withthe Swan or burning Sirius, and broad Orion's wholeconstellation, red Aldebaran, Arcturus, and the NorthernCrown; with the morning star, the light bringer, once now andthen when I saw it, a white-gold ball in the violet-purple sky, orframed about with pale summer vapour floating away as redstreaks shot horizontally in the east. A diffused saffron

ascended into the luminous upper azure. The disk of the sunrose over the hill, fluctuating with throbs of light; his chestheaved in fervour of brilliance. All the glory of the sunrisefilled me with broader and furnace-like vehemence of prayer.

That I might have the deepest of soul-life, the deepest of all,deeper far than all this greatness of the visible universe andeven of the invisible; that I might have a fullness of soul tillnow unknown, and utterly beyond my own conception.

In the deepest darkness of the night the same thought rose inmy mind as in the bright light of noontide. What is there whichI have not used to strengthen the same emotion?



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CHAPTER II

SOMETIMES I went to a deep, narrow valley in the hills, silentand solitary. The sky crossed from side to side, like a roof supported on two walls of green. Sparrows chirped in the

wheat at the verge above, their calls falling like the twittering of swallows from the air. There was no other sound. The shortgrass was dried grey as it grew by the heat; the sun hung overthe narrow vale as if it had been put there by hand. Burning,burning, the sun glowed on the sward at the foot of the slope

where these thoughts burned into me. How many, many years,how many cycles of years, how many bundles of cycles of years,had the sun glowed down thus on that hollow? Since it wasformed how long? Since it was worn and shaped, groove-like, inthe flanks of the hills by mighty forces which had ebbed. Alone

with the sun which glowed on the work when it was done, Isaw back through space to the old time of tree-ferns, of thelizard flying through the air, the lizard-dragon wallowing in seafoam, the mountainous creatures, twice-elephantine, feeding onland; all the crooked sequence of life. The dragon-fly which

passed me traced a continuous descent from the fly marked onstone in those days. The immense time lifted me like a waverolling under a boat; my mind seemed to raise itself as the swellof the cycles came; it felt strong with the power of the ages.

With all that time and power I prayed: that I might have in my soul the intellectual part of it; the idea, the thought. Like ashuttle the mind shot to and fro the past and the present, in aninstant.

Full to the brim of the wondrous past, I felt the wondrouspresent. For the day, the very moment I breathed, that secondof time then in the valley, was as marvellous, as grand, as allthat had gone before. Now, this moment was the wonder andthe glory. Now, this moment was exceedingly wonder-full.Now, this moment give me all the thought, all the idea, all thesoul expressed in the cosmos around me. Give me still more,for the interminable universe, past and present, is but earth;



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give me the unknown soul, wholly apart from it, the soul of which I know only that when I touch the ground, when thesunlight touches my hand, it is not there. Therefore the heartlooks into space to be away from earth. With all the cycles, andthe sunlight streaming through them, with all that is meant by the present, I thought in the deep vale and prayed.

There was a secluded spring to which I sometimes went todrink the pure water, lifting it in the hollow of my hand.Drinking the lucid water, clear as light itself in solution, Iabsorbed the beauty and purity of it. I drank the thought of theelement; I desired soul-nature pure and limpid. When I saw thesparkling dew on the grass, a rainbow broken into drops, it

called up the same thought-prayer. The stormy wind whosesudden twists laid the trees on the ground woke the samefeeling; my heart shouted with it. The soft summer air whichentered when I opened my window in the morning breathedthe same sweet desire. At night, before sleeping, I alwayslooked out at the shadowy trees, the hills looming indistinctly inthe dark, a star seen between the drifting clouds; prayer of soul-life always. I chose the highest room, bare and gaunt, because

as I sat at work I could look out and see more of the wideearth, more of the dome of the sky, and could think my desirethrough these. When the crescent of the new moon shone, allthe old thoughts were renewed.

All the succeeding incidents of the year repeated my prayer as Inoted them. The first green leaf on the hawthorn, the firstspike of meadow grass, the first song of the nightingale, thegreen ear of wheat. I spoke it with the ear of wheat as the suntinted it golden; with the whitening barley; again with the redgold spots of autumn on the beech, the buff oak leaves, and thegossamer dew-weighted. All the larks over the green corn sang it for me, all the dear swallows; the green leaves rustled it; thegreen brook flags waved it; the swallows took it with them torepeat it for me in distant lands. By the running brook Imeditated it; a flash of sunlight here in the curve, a flickeryonder on the ripples, the birds bathing in the sandy shallow,



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the rush of falling water. As the brook ran winding through themeadow, so one thought ran winding through my days.

The sciences I studied never checked it for a moment; nor didthe books of old philosophy. The sun was stronger thanscience; the hills more than philosophy. Twice circumstancesgave me a brief view of the sea then the passion rosetumultuous as the waves. It was very bitter to me to leave thesea.

Sometimes I spent the whole day walking over the hillssearching for it; as if the labour of walking would force it fromthe ground. I remained in the woods for hours, among the ash

sprays and the fluttering of the ring-doves at their nests, thescent of pines here and there, dreaming my prayer.

My work was most uncongenial and useless, but even thensometimes a gleam of sunlight on the wall, the buzz of a bee atthe window, would bring the thought to me. Only to make memiserable, for it was a waste of golden time while the richsunlight streamed on hill and plain. There was a wrenching of

the mind, a straining of the mental sinews; I was forced to dothis, my mind was yonder. Weariness, exhaustion, nerve-illnessoften ensued. The insults which are showered on poverty, long struggle of labour, the heavy pressure of circumstances, theunhappiness, only stayed the expression of the feeling. It wasalways there. Often in the streets of London, as the red sunsetflamed over the houses, the old thought, the old prayer, came.

Not only in grassy fields with green leaf and running brook didthis constant desire find renewal. More deeply still with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of form,ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies theoutcome and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and greenleaf, of flowers, pure water, and sweet air. This is embodimentand highest expression; the scattered, uncertain, and designlessloveliness of tree and sunlight brought to shape. Through thisbeauty I prayed deepest and longest, and down to this hour.



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The shape, the divine idea of that shape, the swelling muscle orthe dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite orHercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the soul-nature, let divine beauty bring to me divine soul. Swart Nubian,

white Greek, delicate Italian, massive Scandinavian, in all theexquisite pleasure the form gave, and gives, to me immediately becomes intense prayer.

If I could have been in physical shape like these, how despicable in comparison I am; to be shapely of form is soinfinitely beyond wealth, power, fame, all that ambition cangive, that these are dust before it. Unless of the human form,no pictures hold me; the rest are flat surfaces. So, too, with the

other arts, they are dead; the potters, the architects,meaningless, stony, and some repellent, like the cold touch of porcelain. No prayer with these. Only the human form in artcould raise it, and most in statuary. I have seen so little goodstatuary, it is a regret to me; still, that I have is beyond all otherart. Fragments here, a bust yonder, the broken pieces broughtfrom Greece, copies, plaster casts, a memory of an Aphrodite,of a Persephone, of an Apollo, that is all; but even drawings of

statuary will raise the prayer. These statues were like myself fullof a thought, forever about to burst forth as a bud, yet silent inthe same attitude. Give me to live the soul-life they express.

The smallest fragment of marble carved in the shape of thehuman arm will wake the desire I felt in my hill-prayer.

Time went on; good fortune and success never for an instantdeceived me that they were in themselves to be sought; only my soul-thought was worthy. Further years bringing muchsuffering, grinding the very life out; new troubles, renewedinsults, loss of what hard labour had earned, the bitter question:Is it not better to leap into the sea? These, too, have made noimpression; constant still to the former prayer my mindendures. It was my chief regret that I had not endeavoured to

write these things, to give expression to this passion. I am now trying, but I see that I shall only in part succeed.



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The same prayer comes to me at this very hour. It is now lesssolely associated with the sun and sea, hills, woods, orbeauteous human shape. It is always within. It requires no

waking; no renewal; it is always with me. I am it; the fact of my existence expresses it. After a long interval I came to the hillsagain, this time by the coast. I found a deep hollow on the sideof a great hill, a green concave opening to the sea, where Icould rest and think in perfect quiet. Behind me were furzebushes dried by the heat; immediately in front dropped thesteep descent of the bowl-like hollow which received andbrought up to me the faint sound of the summer waves.

Yonder lay the immense plain of sea, the palest green under thecontinued sunshine, as though the heat had evaporated the

colour from it; there was no distinct horizon, a heat-mistenclosed it and looked farther away than the horizon wouldhave done. Silence and sunshine, sea and hill gradually broughtmy mind into the condition of intense prayer. Day after day,for hours at a time, I came there, my soul-desire always thesame. Presently I began to consider how I could put a part of that prayer into form, giving it an object. Could I bring it intosuch a shape as would admit of actually working upon the lines

it indicated for any good?One evening, when the bright white star in Lyra was shining almost at the zenith over me, and the deep concave was themore profound in the dusk, I formulated it into three divisions.First, I desired that I might do or find something to exalt thesoul, something to enable it to live its own life, a more powerfulexistence now. Secondly, I desired to be able to do something for the flesh, to make a discovery or perfect a method by whichthe fleshly body might enjoy more pleasure, longer life, andsuffer less pain. Thirdly, to construct a more flexible engine

with which to carry into execution the design of the will. Icalled this the Lyra prayer, to distinguish it from the far deeperemotion in which the soul was alone concerned.

Of the three divisions, the last was of so little importance that itscarcely deserved to be named in conjunction with the others.



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Mechanism increases convenience, in no degree does it conferphysical or moral perfection. The rudimentary enginesemployed thousands of years ago in raising buildings were inthat respect equal to the complicated machines of the presentday. Control of iron and steel has not altered or improved thebodily man. I even debated some time whether such a thirddivision should be included at all. Our bodies are now conveyed all round the world with ease, but obtain noadvantage. As they start so they return. The most perfecthuman families of ancient times were almost stationary, asthose of Greece. Perfection of form was found in Sparta; how small a spot compared to those continents over which we arenow taken so quickly! Such perfection of form might perhaps

again dwell, contented and complete in itself, on such a strip of land as I could see between me and the sand of the sea. Again, a

watch keeping correct time is no guarantee that the bearer shallnot suffer pain. The owner of the watch may be soulless,

without mind-fire, a mere creature. No benefit to the heart orto the body accrues from the most accurate mechanism. HenceI debated whether the third division should be included. But Ireflected that time cannot be put back on the dial, we cannot

return to Sparta; there is an existent state of things, and existentmultitudes; and possibly a more powerful engine, flexible to the will, might give them that freedom which is the one, and theone only, political or social idea I possess. For liberty, therefore,let it be included.

For the flesh, this arm of mine, the limbs of others gracefully moving, let me find something that will give them greaterperfection. That the bones may be firmer, somewhat larger if that would be an advantage, certainly stronger, that the cartilageand sinews may be more enduring, and the muscles morepowerful, something after the manner of those ideal limbs andmuscles sculptured of old, these in the flesh and real. That theorgans of the body may be stronger in their action, perfect, andlasting. That the exterior flesh may be yet more beautiful; thatthe shape may be finer, and the motions graceful. These are thesoberest words I can find, purposely chosen; for I am so rapt in



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the beauty of the human form, and so earnestly, soinexpressibly, prayerful to see that form perfect, that my fullthought is not to be written. Unable to express it fully, I haveconsidered it best to put it in the simplest manner of words. Ibelieve in the human form; let me find something, somemethod, by which that form may achieve the utmost beauty. Itsbeauty is like an arrow, which may be shot any distanceaccording to the strength of the bow. So the idea expressed inthe human shape is capable of indefinite expansion andelevation of beauty.

Of the mind, the inner consciousness, the soul, my prayerdesired that I might discover a mode of life for it, so that it

might not only conceive of such a life, but actually enjoy it onthe earth. I wished to search out a new and higher set of ideason which the mind should work. The simile of a new book of the soul is the nearest to convey the meaning, a book drawnfrom the present and future, not the past. Instead of a set of ideas based on tradition, let me give the mind a new thoughtdrawn straight from the wondrous present, direct this very hour. Next, to furnish the soul with the means of executing its

will, of carrying thought into action. In other words, for thesoul to become a power. These three formed the Lyra prayer,of which the two first are immeasurably the in more important.I believe in the human being, mind and flesh; form and soul.

It happened just afterwards that I went to Pevensey, andimmediately the ancient wall swept my mind back seventeenhundred years to the eagle, the pilum, and the short sword. Thegrey stones, the thin red bricks laid by those whose eyes hadseen Caesar's Rome, lifted me out of the grasp of house-life, of modern civilisation, of those minutiae which occupy themoment. The grey stone made me feel as if I had existed fromthen till now, so strongly did I enter into and see my own life asif reflected. My own existence was focused back on me; I saw its joy, its unhappiness, its birth, its death, its possibilitiesamong the infinite, above all its yearning Question. Why?Seeing it thus clearly, and lifted out of the moment by the force





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CHAPTER III

THERE were grass-grown tumuli on the hills to which of old Iused to walk, sit down at the foot of one of them, and think.Some warrior had been interred there in the ante historic times.

The sun of the summer morning shone on the dome of sward,and the air came softly up from the wheat below, the tips of thegrasses swayed as it passed sighing faintly, it ceased, and thebees hummed by to the thyme and heath bells. I becameabsorbed in the glory of the day, the sunshine, the sweet air, theyellowing corn turning from its sappy green to summer's noonof gold, the lark's song like a waterfall in the sky. I felt at thatmoment that I was like the spirit of the man whose body wasinterred in the tumulus; I could understand and feel hisexistence the same as my own. He was as real to me twothousand years after interment as those I had seen in the body.

The abstract personality of the dead seemed as existent asthought. As my thought could slip back the twenty centuries ina moment to the forest-days when he hurled the spear, or shot

with the bow, hunting the deer, and could return again as

swiftly to this moment, so his spirit could endure from then tillnow, and the time was nothing.

Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not causeits extinction. It was no longer to the soul than my thoughtoccupied to me. Recognising my own inner consciousness, thepsyche, so clearly, death did not seem to me to affect thepersonality. In dissolution there was no bridgeless chasm, nounfathomable gulf of separation; the spirit did not immediately become inaccessible, leaping at a bound to an immeasurabledistance. Look at another person while living; the soul is not

visible, only the body which it animates. Therefore, merely because after death the soul is not visible is no demonstrationthat it does not still live. The condition of being unseen is thesame condition which occurs while the body is living, so thatintrinsically there is nothing exceptionable, or supernatural, inthe life of the soul after death. Resting by the tumulus, the spirit



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of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive,and very close. This was quite natural, as natural and simple asthe grass waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the larks'songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could Iunderstand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural,requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, likeearth. Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as Ifelt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyondimmortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence,higher than immortality.

That there is no knowing, in the sense of written reasons, whether the soul lives on or not, I am fully aware. I do not

hope or fear. At least while I am living I have enjoyed the ideaof immortality, and the idea of my own soul. If then, afterdeath, I am resolved without exception into earth, air, and

water, and the spirit goes out like a flame, still I shall have hadthe glory of that thought.

It happened once that a man was drowned while bathing, andhis body was placed in an outhouse near the garden. I passed

the outhouse continually, sometimes on purpose to think aboutit, and it always seemed to me that the man was still living.Separation is not to be comprehended; the spirit of the man didnot appear to have gone to an in conceivable distance. As my thought flashes itself back through the centuries to the luxury of Canopus, and can see the gilded couches of a city extinct, soit slips through the future, and immeasurable time in front is noboundary to it. Certainly the man was not dead to me.

Sweetly the summer air came up to the tumulus, the grasssighed softly, the butterflies went by, sometimes alighting onthe green dome. Two thousand years! Summer after summerthe blue butterflies had visited the mound, the thyme hadflowered, the wind sighed in the grass. The azure morning hadspread its arms over the low tomb; and full glowing noonburned on it; the purple of sunset rosied the sward. Stars,ruddy in the vapour of the southern horizon, beamed at





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and the flow, the time, of the brook does not exist to me. Thegreat clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescentmoon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to methan the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time. Time hasnever existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement.It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always will be. By no possible means could I get into time if I tried. I am ineternity now and must there remain. Haste not, be at rest, thisNow is eternity. Because the idea of time has left my mind, if ever it had any hold on it, to me the man interred in thetumulus is living now as I live. We are both in eternity.

There is no separation-no past; eternity, the Now, iscontinuous. When all the stars have revolved they only produceNow again. The continuity of Now is for ever. So that itappears to me purely natural, and not super natural, that thesoul whose temporary frame was interred in this mound shouldbe existing as I sit on the sward. How infinitely deeper isthought than the million miles of the firmament! The wonder ishere, not there; now, not to be, now always. Things that have

been miscalled supernatural appear to me simple, more naturalthan nature, than earth, than sea, or sun. It is beyond telling more natural that I should have a soul than not, that thereshould be immortality; I think there is much more thanimmortality. It is matter which is the supernatural, and difficultof under-standing. Why this clod of earth I hold in my hand?

Why this water which drops sparkling from my fingers dippedin the brook? Why are they at all? When? How? What for?Matter is beyond understanding, mysterious, impenetrable; Itouch it easily, comprehend it, no. Soul, mind, the thought, theidea, is easily understood, it understands itself and is conscious.

The supernatural miscalled, the natural in truth, is the real. Tome everything is supernatural. How strange that condition of mind which cannot accept anything but the earth, the sea, thetangible universe! Without the misnamed supernatural these tome seem incomplete, unfinished. Without soul all these are



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dead. Except when I walk by the sea, and my soul is by it, thesea is dead. Those seas by which no man has stood, which nosoul has been, whether on earth or the planets, are dead. Nomatter how majestic the planet rolls in space, unless a soul bethere it is dead. As I move about in the sunshine I feel in themidst of the supernatural: in the midst of immortal things. It isimpossible to wrest the mind down to the same laws that rulepieces of timber, water, or earth. They do not control the soul,however rigidly they may bind matter. So full am I always of asense of the immortality now at this moment round about me,that it would not surprise me in the least if a circumstanceoutside physical experience occurred. It would seem to mequite natural. Give the soul the power it conceives, and there

would be nothing wonderful in it.

I can see nothing astonishing in what are called miracles. Only those who are mesmerised by matter can find a difficulty insuch events. I am aware that the evidence for miracles islogically and historically untrustworthy; I am not defending recorded miracles. My point is that in principle I see no reasonat all why they should not take place this day. I do not even say

that there are or ever have been miracles, but I maintain thatthey would be perfectly natural. The wonder rather is that they do not happen frequently. Consider the limitless conceptions of the soul: let it possess but the power to realise thoseconceptions for one hour, and how little, how trifling would bethe helping of the injured or the sick to regain health andhappiness, merely to think it. A soul-work would require but athought. Soul-work is an expression better suited to my meaning than "miracle," a term like others into which a specialsense has been infused.

When I consider that I dwell this moment in the eternal Now that has ever been and will be, that I am in the midst of immortal things this moment, that there probably are Souls asinfinitely superior to mine as mine to a piece of timber, whatthen, pray, is a "miracle"? As commonly understood, a"miracle" is a mere nothing. I can conceive soul-works done by



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simple will or thought a thousand times greater. I marvel thatthey do not happen this moment. The air, the sunlight, thenight, all that surrounds me seems crowded with inexpressiblepowers, with the influence of Souls, or existences, so that I walk in the midst of immortal things. I myself am a living witness of it. Sometimes I have concentrated myself, and driven away by continued will all sense of outward appearances, looking straight with the full power of my mind inwards on myself. Ifind "I" am there; an "I" I do not wholly understand, or know,something is there distinct from earth and timber, from fleshand bones. Recognising it, I feel on the margin of a lifeunknown, very near, almost touching it: on the verge of powers

which if I could grasp would give me an immense breadth of

existence, an ability to execute what I now only conceive; mostprobably of far more than that. To see that "I" is to know that Iam surrounded with immortal things. If, when I die, that "I"also dies, and becomes extinct, still even then I have had theexaltation of these ideas.

How many words it has taken to describe so briefly the feelingsand the thoughts that came to me by the tumulus; thoughts that

swept past and were gone, and were succeeded by others whileyet the shadow of the mound had not moved from one thymeflower to another, not the breadth of a grass blade. Softly breathed the sweet south wind, gently the yellow corn wavedbeneath; the ancient, ancient sun shone on the fresh grass andthe flower, my heart opened wide as the broad, broad earth. Ispread my arms out, laying them on the sward, seizing the grass,to take the fullness of the days. Could I have my own way afterdeath I would be burned on a pyre of pine-wood, open to theair, and placed on the summit of the hills. Then let my ashes bescattered abroad, not collected urn an urn, freely sown wide andbroadcast. That is the natural interment of man, of man whose

Thought at least has been among the immortals; interment inthe elements. Burial is not enough, it does not give sufficientsolution into the elements speedily; a furnace is confined. Thehigh open air of the topmost hill, there let the tawny flame lick up the fragment called the body; there cast the ashes into the



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space it longed for while living. Such a luxury of interment isonly for the wealthy; I fear I shall not be able to afford it. Elsethe smoke of my resolution into the elements should certainly arise in time on the hill-top.

The silky grass sighs as the wind comes carrying the bluebutterfly more rapidly than his wings. A large humble-bee burrsround the green dome against which I rest; my hands arescented with thyme. The sweetness of the day, the fullness of the earth, the beauteous earth, how shall I say it?

Three things only have been discovered of that which concernsthe inner consciousness since before written history began.

Three things only in twelve thousand written, or sculptured,years, and in the dumb, dim time before then. Three ideas theCavemen primeval wrested from the unknown, the night whichis round us still in daylight, the existence of the soul,immortality, the deity. These things found, prayer followed as asequential result. Since then nothing further has been found inall the twelve thousand years, as if men had been satisfied andhad found these to suffice. They do not suffice me. I desire to

advance further, and to wrest a fourth, and even still more thana fourth, from the darkness of thought. I want more ideas of soul-life. I am certain that there are more yet to be found. Agreat life, an entire civilisation, lies just outside the pale of common thought. Cities and countries, inhabitants,intelligences, culture, an entire civilisation. Except by illustrations drawn from familiar things, there is no way of indicating a new idea. I do not mean actual cities, actualcivilisation. Such life is different from any yet imagined. Anexus of ideas exists of which nothing is known, a vast systemof ideas, a cosmos of thought. There is an Entity, a Soul-Entity, as yet unrecognised. These, rudely expressed, constitutemy Fourth Idea. It is beyond, or beside, the three discovered by the Cavemen; it is in addition to the existence of the soul; inaddition to immortality; and beyond the idea of the deity. Ithink there is something more than existence.



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There is an immense ocean over which the mind can sail, upon which the vessel of thought has not yet been launched. I hopeto launch it. The mind of so many thousand years has workedround and round inside the circle of these three ideas as a boaton an inland lake. Let us haul it over the belt of land, launch onthe ocean, and sail outwards.

There is so much beyond all that has ever yet been imagined. As I write these words, in the very moment, I feel that the whole air, the sunshine out yonder lighting up the ploughedearth, the distant sky, the circumambient ether, and that farspace, is full of soul-secrets, soul-life, things outside theexperience of all the ages. The fact of my own existence as I

write, as I exist at this second, is so marvellous, so miracle-like,strange, and supernatural to me, that I unhesitatingly conclude Iam always on the margin of life illimitable, and that there arehigher conditions than existence. Everything around issupernatural; everything so full of unexplained meaning.

Twelve thousand years since the Caveman stood at the mouthof his cavern and gazed out at the night and the stars. He

looked again and saw the sun rise beyond the sea. He reposedin the noontide heat under the shade of the trees, he closed hiseyes and looked into himself. He was face to face with theearth, the sun, the night; face to face with himself. There wasnothing between; no wall of written tradition; no built-upsystem of culture, his naked mind was confronted by nakedearth. He made three idea-discoveries, wresting them from theunknown; the existence of his soul, immortality, the deity. Now,to-day, as I write, I stand in exactly the same position as theCaveman. Written tradition, systems of culture, modes of thought, have for me no existence. If ever they took any holdof my mind it must have been very slight; they have long agobeen erased.

From earth and sea and sun, from night, the stars, from day, thetrees, the hills, from my own soul, from these I think. I standthis moment at the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with



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nature, face to face with the supernatural, with myself. My naked mind confronts the unknown. I see as clearly as thenoonday that this is not all; I see other and higher conditionsthan existence; I see not only the existence of the soul,immortality, but, in addition, I realise a soul-life illimitable; Irealise the existence of a cosmos of thought; I realise theexistence of an inexpressible entity infinitely higher than deity. Istrive to give utterance to a Fourth Idea. The very idea thatthere is another idea is something gained. The three found by the Cavemen are but steppingstones: first links of an endlesschain. At the mouth of the ancient cave, face to face with theunknown, they prayed. Prone in heart to- day I pray, Give methe deepest soul-life.



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CHAPTER IV

THE wind sighs through the grass, sighs in the sunshine; it hasdrifted the butterfly eastwards along the hill. A few yards away there lies the skull of a lamb on the turf, white and bleached,picked clean long since by crows and ants. Like the faint rippleof the summer sea sounding in the hollow of the ear, so thesweet air ripples in the grass. The ashes of the man interred inthe tumuius are indistinguishable; they have sunk away like raininto the earth; so his body has disappeared. I am under nodelusion; I am fully aware that no demonstration can be givenof the three stepping-stones of the Cavemen. The soul isinscrutable; it is not in evidence to show that it exists;immortality is not tangible. Full well I know that reason andknowledge and experience tend to disprove all three; thatexperience denies answer to prayer. I am under no delusion

whatever; I grasp death firmly in conception as I can grasp thisbleached bone; utter extinction, annihilation. That the soul is aproduct at best of organic composition; that it goes out like aflame. This may be the end; my soul may sink like rain into the

earth and disappear. Wind and earth, sea, and night and day, what then? Let my soul be but a product, what then? I say it isnothing to me; this only I know, that while I have lived, now,this moment, while I live, I think immortality, I lift my mind toa Fourth Idea. If I pass into utter oblivion, yet I have had that.

The original three ideas of the Cavemen became encumbered with superstition; ritual grew up, and ceremony, and long ranksof souls were painted on papyri waiting to be weighed in thescales, and to be punished or rewarded. These cobwebsgrotesque have sullied the original discoveries and cast theminto discredit. Erase them altogether, and consider only theunderlying principles. The principles do not go far enough, butI shall not discard all of them for that. Even supposing the pureprinciples to be illusions, and annihilation the end, even then itis better, it is something gained to have thought them. Thoughtis life; to have thought them is to have lived them. Accepting



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two of them as true in principle, then I say that these are butthe threshold. For twelve thousand years no effort has beenmade to get beyond that threshold. These are but the primer of soul-life; the merest hieroglyphics chipped out, a little shapegiven to the unknown.

Not to-morrow but to-day. Not the to-morrow of the tumulus,the hour of the sunshine now. This moment give me to livesoul-life, not only after death. Now is eternity, now I am in themidst of immortality; now the supernatural crowds around me.Open my mind, give my soul to see, let me live it now on earth,

while I hear the burring of the larger bees, the sweet air in thegrass, and watch the yellow wheat wave beneath me. Sun and

earth and sea, night and day, these are the least of things. Giveme soul-life.

There is nothing human in nature. The earth, though loved sodearly, would let me perish on the ground, and neither bring forth food nor water. Burning in the sky the great sun, of

whose company I have been so fond, would merely burn onand make no motion to assist me. Those who have been in an

open boat at sea without water have proved the mercies of thesun, and of the deity who did not give them one drop of rain,dying in misery under the same rays that smile so beautifully onthe flowers. In the south the sun is the enemy; night andcoolness and rain are the friends of man. As for the sea, itoffers us salt water which we cannot drink. The trees carenothing for us; the hill I visited so often in days gone by has notmissed me. The sun scorches man, and willing his naked stateroast him alive. The sea and the fresh water alike make noeffort to uphold him if his vessel founders; he casts up his armsin vain, they come to their level over his head, filling the spothis body occupied. If he falls from a cliff the air parts; the earthbeneath dashes him to pieces.

Water he can drink, but it is not produced for him; how many thousands have perished for want of it? Some fruits areproduced which he can eat, but they do not produce themselves



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for him; merely for the purpose of continuing their species. In wild, tropical countries, at the first glance there appears to besome consideration for him, but it is on the surface only. Thelion pounces on him, the rhinoceros crushes him, the serpentbites, insects torture, diseases rack him. Disease worked itsdreary will even among the flower-crowned Polynesians.Returning to our own country, this very thyme which scents my fingers did not grow for that purpose, but for its own. So doesthe wheat beneath; we utilise it, but its original and nativepurpose was for itself. By night it is the same as by day; thestars care not, they pursue their courses revolving, and we arenothing to them. There is nothing human in the whole roundof nature. All nature, all the universe that we can see, is

absolutely indifferent to us, and except to us human life is of nomore value than grass. If the entire human race perished at thishour, what difference would it make to the earth? What wouldthe earth care? As much as for the extinct dodo, or for the fateof the elephant now going.

On the contrary, a great part, perhaps the whole, of nature andof the universe is distinctly anti-human. The term inhuman

does not express my meaning, anti-human is better; outer-human, in the sense of beyond, outside, almost grotesque in itsattitude towards, would nearly convey it. Everything is anti-human. How extraordinary, strange, and incomprehensible arethe creatures captured out of the depths of the sea! Thedistorted fishes; the ghastly cuttles; the hideous eel-like shapes;the crawling shell-encrusted things; the centipede-like beings;monstrous forms, to see which gives a shock to the brain. They shock the mind because they exhibit an absence of design.

There is no idea in them.

They have no shape, form, grace, or purpose; they call up a vague sense of chaos, chaos which the mind revolts from. It would be a relief to the thought if they ceased to be, and utterly disappeared from the sea. They are not inimical of intenttowards man, not even the shark; but there the shark is, andthat is enough. These miserably hideous things of the sea are



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not anti-human in the sense of persecution, they are outside,they are ultra and beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is

vivid because these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathomsdeep, are seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment they had come into existence. Use has nothabituated it to them, so that their anti-human character is atonce apparent, and stares at us with glassy eye.

But it is the same in reality with the creatures on the earth. There are some of these even now to which use has notaccustomed the mind. Such, for instance, as the toad. At itsshapeless shape appearing in an unexpected corner many people start and exclaim. They are aware that they shall receive

no injury from it, yet it affrights them, it sends a shock to themind. The reason lies in its obviously anti-human character. Allthe designless, formless chaos of chance-directed matter,

without idea or human plan, squats there embodied in thepathway. By watching the creature, and convincing the mindfrom observation that it is harmless, and even has uses, thehorror wears away. But still remains the form to which themind can never reconcile itself. Carved in wood it is still

repellent.Or suddenly there is a rustle like a faint hiss in the grass, and agreen snake glides over the bank. The breath in the chest seemsto lose its vitality; for an instant the nerves refuse to transmitthe force of life. The gliding yellow-streaked worm is so utterly opposed to the ever present Idea in the mind. Custom may reduce the horror, but no long pondering can ever bring thatcreature within the pale of the human Idea. These are sodistinctly opposite and anti-human that thousands of years havenot sufficed to soften their outline. Various insects andcreeping creatures excite the same sense in lesser degrees.

Animals and birds in general do not. The tiger is dreaded, butcauses no disgust. The exception is in those that feed on offal.Horses and dogs we love; we not only do not recogniseanything opposite in them, we come to love them.



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They are useful to us, they show more or less sympathy with us,they possess, especially the horse, a certain grace of movement.

A gloss, as it were, is thrown over them by these attributes andby familiarity. The shape of the horse to the eye has becomeconventional: it is accepted. Yet the horse is not in any sensehuman. Could we look at it suddenly, without previousacquaintance, as at strange fishes in a tank, the ultra-humancharacter of the horse would be apparent. It is the curves of theneck and body that carry the horse past without adversecomment. Examine the hind legs in detail, and the curiousbackward motion, the shape and anti-human curves becomeapparent. Dogs take us by their intelligence, but they have nohand; pass the hand over the dog's head, and the shape of the

skull to the sense of feeling is almost as repellent as the form of the toad to the sense of sight. We have gradually gatheredaround us all the creatures that are less markedly anti-human,horses and dogs and birds, but they are still themselves. They originally existed like the wheat, for themselves; we utilise them,but they are not of us.

There is nothing human in any living animal. All nature, the

universe as far as we see, is anti- or ultra-human, outside, andhas no concern with man. These things are unnatural to him.By no course of reasoning, however tortuous, can nature andthe universe be fitted to the mind. Nor can the mind be fittedto the cosmos. My mind cannot be twisted to it; I am separatealtogether from these designless things. The soul cannot be

wrested down to them. The laws of nature are of noimportance to it. I refuse to be bound by the laws of the tides,nor am I so bound. Though bodily swung round on thisrotating globe, my mind always remains in the centre. No tidallaw, no rotation, no gravitation can control my thought.

Centuries of thought have failed to reconcile and fit the mind tothe universe, which is designless, and purposeless, and withoutidea. I will not endeavour to fit my thought to it any longer; Ifind and believe myself to be distinct, separate; and I will labourin earnest to obtain the highest culture for myself. As these



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natural things have no connection with man, it follows againthat the natural is the strange and mysterious, and thesupernatural the natural.

There being nothing human in nature or the universe, and allthings being ultra-human and without design, shape, orpurpose, I conclude that, no deity has anything to do withnature. There is no god in nature, nor in any matter anywhere,either in the clods on the earth or in the composition of thestars. For what we understand by the deity is the purest form of Idea, of Mind, and no mind is exhibited in these. That whichcontrols them is distinct altogether from deity. It is not force inthe sense of electricity, nor a deity as god, nor a spirit, not even

an intelligence, but a power quite different to anything yetimagined. I cease, therefore, to look for deity in nature or thecosmos at large, or to trace any marks of divine handiwork. Isearch for traces of this force which is not god, and is certainly not the higher than deity of whom I have written. It is a force

without a mind. I wish to indicate something more subtle thanelectricity, but absolutely devoid of consciousness, and with nomore feeling than the force which lifts the tides.

Next, in human affairs, in the relations of man with man, in theconduct of life, in the events that occur, in human affairsgenerally everything happens by chance. No prudence inconduct, no wisdom or foresight can effect anything, for themost trivial circumstance will upset the deepest plan of the

wisest mind. As Xenophon observed in old times, wisdom islike casting dice and determining your course by the numberthat appears. Virtue, humanity, the best and most beautifulconduct is wholly in vain. The history of thousands of yearsdemonstrates it. In all these years there is no more moving instance on record than that of Danae, when she was draggedto the precipice, two thousand years ago. Sophron wasgovernor of Ephesus, and Laodice plotted to assassinate him.Danae discovered the plot, and warned Sophron, who fled, andsaved his life. Laodice, the murderess in intent, had Danaeseized and cast from a cliff. On the verge Danae said that some



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persons despised the deity, and they might now prove thejustice of their contempt by her fate. For having saved the man

who was to her as a husband, she was rewarded in this way withcruel death by the deity, but Laodice was advanced to honour.

The bitterness of these words remains to this hour.

In truth the deity, if responsible for such a thing, or for similarthings which occur now, should be despised. One must alwaysdespise the fatuous belief in such a deity. But as everything inhuman affairs obviously happens by chance, it is clear that nodeity is responsible. If the deity guides chance in that manner,then let the deity be despised. Apparently the deity does notinterfere, and all things happen by chance. I cease, therefore, to

look for traces of the deity in life, because no such traces exist.

I conclude that there is an existence, a something higher thansoul, higher, better, and more perfect than deity. Earnestly Ipray to find this something better than a god. There issomething superior, higher, more good. For this I search,labour, think, and pray. If after all there be nothing, and my soul has to go out like a flame, yet even then I have thought

this while it lives. With the whole force of my existence, withthe whole force of my thought, mind, and soul, I pray to findthis Highest Soul, this greater than deity, this better than god.Give me to live the deepest soul-life now and always with thisSoul. For want of words I write soul, but I think that it issomething beyond soul.







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broader than the earth; it is broader now than even then, morethirsty and desirous. After the sensuous enjoyment always camethe thought, the desire: That I might be like this; that I mighthave the inner meaning of the sun, the light, the earth, the treesand grass, translated into some growth of excellence in myself,both of body and of mind; greater perfection of physique,greater perfection of mind and soul; that I might be higher inmyself. To this oak I came daily for a long time; sometimes only for a minute, for just to view the spot was enough. In the bittercold of spring, when the north wind blackened everything, Iused to come now and then at night to look from under thebare branches at the splendour of the southern sky. The starsburned with brilliance, broad Orion and flashing Sirius, there

are more or brighter constellations visible then than all the year:and the clearness of the air and the blackness of the sky, black,not clouded, let them gleam in their fullness. They lifted me,they gave me fresh vigour of soul. Not all that the stars couldhave given, had they been destinies, could have satiated me.

This, all this, and more, I wanted in myself.

There was a place a mile or so along the road where the hills

could be seen much better; I went there frequently to think thesame thought. Another spot was by an elm, a very short walk, where openings in the trees, and the slope of the ground,brought the hills well into view. This too, was a favouritethinking-place. Another was a wood, half an hour's walk distant, through part of which a rude track went, so that it wasnot altogether enclosed. The ash-saplings, and the trees, the firs,the hazel bushes, to be among these enabled me to be myself.From the buds of spring to the berries of autumn, I alwaysliked to be there. Sometimes in spring there was a sheen of blue-bells covering acres; the doves cooed; the blackbirds

whistled sweetly; there was a taste of green things in the air. Butit was the tall firs that pleased me most; the glance rose up theflame-shaped fir-tree, tapering to its green tip, and above wasthe azure sky. By aid of the tree I felt the sky more. By aid of everything beautiful I felt myself, and in that intense sense of consciousness prayed for greater perfection of soul and body.



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Afterwards, I walked almost daily more than two miles along the road to a spot where the hills began, where from the firstrise the road could be seen winding southwards over the hills,open and unenclosed. I paused a minute or two by a clump of firs, in whose branches the wind always sighed, there is always amovement of the air on a hill. Southwards the sky wasillumined by the sun, southwards the clouds moved across theopening or pass in the amphitheatre, and southwards, thoughfar distant, was the sea. There I could think a moment. Thesepilgrimages gave me a few sacred minutes daily; the momentseemed holy when the thought or desire came in its full force.

A time came when, having to live in a town, these pilgrimageshad to be suspended. The wearisome work on which I wasengaged would not permit of them. But I used to look now andthen, from a window, in the evening at a birch-tree at somedistance; its graceful boughs drooped across the glow of thesunset. The thought was not suspended; it lived in me always. Abitterer time still came when it was necessary to be separatedfrom those I loved. There is little indeed in the more immediate

suburbs of London to gratify the sense of the beautiful. Yetthere was a cedar by which I used to walk up and down, andthink the same thoughts as under the great oak in the solitudeof the sunlit meadows. In the course of slow time happiercircumstances brought us together again, and, though nearLondon, at a spot where there was easy access to meadows and

woods. Hills that purify those who walk on them there werenot. Still I thought my old thoughts.

I was much in London, and, engagements completed, I wandered about in the same way as in the woods of formerdays. From the stone bridges I looked down on the river; thegritty dust, the straws that lie on the bridges, flew up and

whirled round with every gust from the flowing tide; gritty dustthat settles in the nostrils and on the lips, the very residuum of all that is repulsive in the greatest city of the world. The noiseof the traffic and the constant pressure from the crowds



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passing, their incessant and disjointed talk, could not distractme. One moment at least I had, a moment when I thought of the push of the great sea forcing the water to flow under thefeet of these crowds, the distant sea strong and splendid; whenI saw the sunlight gleam on the tidal wavelets; when I felt the

wind, and was conscious of the earth, the sea, the sun, the air,the immense forces working on, while the city hummed by theriver. Nature was deepened by the crowds and foot-wornstones. If the tide had ebbed, and the masts of the vessels weretilted as the hulls rested on the shelving mud, still even theblackened mud did not prevent me seeing the water as waterflowing to the sea. The sea had drawn down, and the wavelets

washing the strand here as they hastened were running the

faster to it. Eastwards from London Bridge the river raced tothe ocean.

The bright morning sun of summer heated the eastern parapetof London Bridge; I stayed in the recess to acknowledge it. Thesmooth water was a broad sheen of light, the built-up riverflowed calm and silent by a thousand doors, rippling only wherethe stream chafed against a chain. Red pennants drooped,

gilded vanes gleamed on polished masts, black-pitched hullsglistened like a black rook's feathers in sunlight; the clear air cutout the forward angles of the warehouses, the shadowed

wharves were quiet in shadows that carried light; far down theships that were hauling out moved in repose, and with thestream floated away into the summer mist. There was a faintblue colour in the air hovering between the built-up banks,against the lit walls, in the hollows of the houses. The swallows

wheeled and climbed, twittered and glided downwards.Burning on, the great sun stood in the sky, heating the parapet,glowing steadfastly upon me as when I rested in the narrow

valley grooved out in prehistoric times. Burning on steadfast,and ever present as my thought. Lighting the broad river, thebroad walls; lighting the least speck of dust; lighting the greatheaven; gleaming on my finger-nail. The fixed point of day, thesun. I was intensely conscious of it; I felt it; I felt the presenceof the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the



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depths of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky,the limitless space, I felt too in the midst of eternity then, in themidst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and thegreatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely realthan the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, therethat moment.

When, weary of walking on the pavements, I went to rest in theNational Gallery, I sat and rested before one or other of thehuman pictures. I am not a picture lover: they are flat surfaces,but those that I call human are nevertheless beautiful. The kneein Daphnis and Chloe and the breast are like living things; they

draw the heart towards them, the heart must love them. I livedin looking; without beauty there is no life for me, the divinebeauty of flesh is life itself to me. The shoulder in the Surprise,the rounded rise of the bust, the exquisite tints of the ripe skin,momentarily gratified the sea- thirst in me. For I thirst with allthe thirst of the salt sea, and the sun-heated sands dry for thetide, with all the sea I thirst for beauty. And I know full wellthat one lifetime, however long, cannot fill my heart. My throat

and tongue and whole body have often been parched andfeverish dry with this measureless thirst, and again moist to thefingers' ends like a sappy bough. It burns in me as the sunburns in the sky.

The glowing face of Cytherea in Titian's Venus and Adonis, theheated cheek, the lips that kiss each eye that gazes on them, thedesiring glance, the golden hair, sunbeams moulded intofeatures, this face answered me. Juno's wide back and mesialgroove, is any thing so lovely as the back ? Cythereals poisedhips unveiled for judgment; these called up the same thirst I felton the green sward in the sun, on the wild beach listening to thequiet sob as the summer wave drank at the land. I will searchthe world through for beauty. I came here and sat to rest beforethese in the days when I could not afford to buy so much as aglass of ale, weary and faint from walking on stone pavements.I came later on, in better times, often straight from labours



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which though necessary will ever be distasteful, always to restmy heart with loveliness. I go still; the divine beauty of flesh islife itself to me. It was, and is, one of my London pilgrimages.

Another was to the Greek sculpture galleries in the BritishMuseum. The statues are not, it is said, the best; broken too,and mutilated, and seen in a dull, commonplace light. But they

were shape, divine shape of man and woman; the form of limband torso, of bust and neck, gave me a sighing sense of rest.

These were they who would have stayed with me under theshadow of the oaks while the blackbirds fluted and the south airswung the cowslips. They would have walked with me among the reddened gold of the wheat. They would have rested with

me on the hill-tops and in the narrow valley grooved of ancienttimes. They would have listened with me to the sob of thesummer sea drinking the land. These had thirsted of sun, andearth, and sea, and sky. Their shape spoke this thirst and desirelike mine, if I had lived with them from Greece till now Ishould not have had enough of them. Tracing the form of limband torso with the eye gave me a sense of rest.

Sometimes I came in from the crowded streets and ceaselesshum; one glance at these shapes and I became myself.Sometimes I came from the Reading-room, where under thedome I often looked up from the desk and realised the crushing hopelessness of books, useless, not equal to one bubble bornealong on the running brook I had walked by, giving no thoughtlike the spring when I lifted the water in my hand and saw thelight gleam on it. Torso and limb, bust and neck instantly returned me to myself; I felt as I did lying on the turf listening to the wind among the grass; it would have seemed natural tohave found butterflies fluttering among he statues. The samedeep desire was with me. I shall always go to speak to them;they are a place of pilgrimage; wherever there is a beautifulstatue there is a place of pilgrimage.

I always stepped aside, too, to look awhile at the head of JuliusCaesar. The domes of the swelling temples of his broad head



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are full of mind, evident to the eye as a globe is full of substance to the sense of feeling in the hands that hold it. Thethin worn cheek is entirely human; endless difficultiessurmounted by endless labour are marked in it, as the sandblast,by dint of particles ceaselessly driven, carves the hardestmaterial. If circumstances favoured him he made thosecircumstances his own by marvellous labour, so as justly toreceive the credit of chance. Therefore the thin cheek is entirely human, the sum of human life made visible in one face, labour,and endurance, and mind, and all in vain. A shadow, of deepsadness has gathered on it in the years that have passed,because endurance was without avail. It is sadder to look atthan the grass-grown tumulus I used to sit by, because it is a

personality, and also on account of the extreme folly of ourhuman race ever destroying our greatest.

Far better had they endeavoured, however hopelessly, to keephim living till this day. Did but the race this hour possess one-hundredth part of his breadth of view, how happy for them! Of

whom else can it be said that he had no enemies to forgivebecause he recognised no enemy? Nineteen hundred years ago

he put in actual practice, with more arbitrary power than any despot, those very principles of humanity which are now putforward as the highest culture. But he made them to be actualthings under his sway.

The one man filled with mind; the one man without avarice,anger, pettiness, littleness; the one man generous and truly greatof all history. It is enough to make one despair to think of themere brutes butting to death the great-minded Caesar. Hecomes nearest to the ideal of a design-power arranging theaffairs of the world for good in practical things. Before his face,the divine brow of mind above, the human suffering-drawncheek beneath, my own thought became set and strengthened.

That I could but look at things in the broad way he did; that Icould not possess one particle of such width of intellect toguide my own course, to cope with and drag forth from the



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iron- resisting forces of the universe some one thing of my prayer for the soul and for the flesh.



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CHAPTER VI

THERE is a place in front of the Royal Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory. It is in the shapeof a triangle with a rounded apex. A stream of traffic runs oneither side, and other streets send their currents down into theopen space before it. Like the spokes of a wheel converging streams of human life flow into this agitated pool. Horses andcarriages, carts, vans, omnibuses, cabs, every kind of conveyance cross each other's course in every possibledirection. Twisting in and out by the wheels and under thehorses' heads, working a devious way, men and women of allconditions wind a path over. They fill the interstices betweenthe carriages and blacken the surface, till the vans almost floaton human beings. Now the streams slacken, and now they rushagain, but never cease; dark waves are always rolling down theincline opposite, waves swell out from the side rivers, allLondon converges into this focus. There is an indistinguishablenoise, it is not clatter, hum, or roar, it is not resolvable; made upof a thousand thousand footsteps, from a thousand hoofs, a

thousand wheels, of haste, and shuffle, and quick movements,and ponderous loads; no attention can resolve it into a fixedsound.

Blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages andbrown vans, green omnibuses and red cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty-red iron clunking on pointless carts, high white

wool- packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlightsparkling on brass harness, gleaming from carriage panels;jingle, jingle, jingle! An intermixed and intertangled, ceaselessly changing jingle, too, of colour; flecks of colour champed, as it

were, like bits in the horses' teeth, frothed and strewn about,and a surface always of dark-dressed people winding like thecurves on fast-flowing water. This is the vortex and whirlpool,the centre of human life today on the earth. Now the tide risesand now it sinks, but the flow of these rivers always continues.



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Here it seethes and whirls, not for an hour only, but for allpresent time, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.

Here it rushes and pushes, the atoms triturate and grind, and,eagerly thrusting by, pursue their separate ends. Here it appearsin its unconcealed personality, indifferent to all else but itself,absorbed and rapt in eager self, devoid and stripped of conventional gloss and politeness, yielding only to get its own

way; driving, pushing, carried on in a stress of feverish forcelike a bullet, dynamic force apart from reason or will, like theforce that lifts the tides and sends the clouds onwards. Thefriction of a thousand interests evolves a condition of electricity in which men are moved to and fro without considering their

steps. Yet the agitated pool of life is stonily indifferent, thethought is absent or preoccupied, for it is evident that the massare unconscious of the scene in which they act.

But it is more sternly real than the very stones, for all these menand women that pass through are driven on by the push of accumulated circumstances; they cannot stay, they must go,their necks are in the slave's ring, they are beaten like seaweed

against the solid walls of fact. In ancient times, Xerxes, the king of kings, looking down upon his myriads, wept to think that ina hundred years not one of them would be left. Where will bethese millions of to-day in a hundred years? But, further thanthat, let us ask, Where then will be the sum and outcome of their labour? If they wither away like summer grass, will not atleast a result be left which those of a hundred years hence may be the better for? No, not one jot! There will not be any sum oroutcome or result of this ceaseless labour and movement; it

vanishes in the moment that it is done, and in a hundred yearsnothing will be there, for nothing is there now. There will be nomore sum or result than accumulates from the motion of arevolving cowl on a housetop. Nor do they receive any moresunshine during their lives, for they are unconscious of the sun.

I used to come and stand near the apex of the promontory of pavement which juts out towards the pool of life; I still go there



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to ponder. Burning in the sky, the sun shone on me as when Irested in the narrow valley carved in prehistoric time. Burning in the sky, I can never forget the sun. The heat of summer isdry there as if the light carried an impalpable dust; dry,breathless heat that will not let the skin respire, but swathes upthe dry fire in the blood. But beyond the heat and light, I feltthe presence of the sun as I felt it in the solitary valley, thepresence of the resistless forces of the universe; the sun burnedin the sky as I stood and pondered. Is there any theory,philosophy, or creed, is there any system or culture, any formulated method able to meet and satisfy each separate itemof this agitated pool of human life? By which they may beguided, by which hope, by which look forward? Not a mere

illusion of the craven heart, something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against which, like drifted sea-weed, they aredashed; something to give each separate personality sunshineand a flower in its own existence now; something to shape thismillion-handed labour to an end and outcome that will leavemore sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed?Something real now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hournow, as I stand and the sun burns. Can any creed, philosophy,

system, or culture endure the test and remain unmolten in thisfierce focus of human life?

Consider, is there anything slowly painted on the once mysticand now commonplace papyri of ancient, ancient Egypt, heldon the mummy's withered breast? In that elaborate ritual, in theprocession of the symbols, in the winged circle, in the laborioussarcophagus? Nothing; absolutely nothing! Before the fierceheat of the human furnace, the papyri smoulder away as papersmoulders under a lens in the sun. Remember Nineveh and thecult of the fir-cone, the turbaned and bearded bulls of stone,the lion hunt, the painted chambers loaded with tile books, thelore of the arrow-headed writing. What is in Assyria? There aresand, and failing rivers, and in Assyria's writings an utternothing. The aged caves of India, who shall tell when they weresculptured? Far back when the sun was burning, burning in thesky as now in untold precedent time. Is there any meaning in



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those ancient caves? The indistinguishable noise not to beresolved, born of the human struggle, mocks in answer.

In the strange characters of the Zend, in the Sanscrit, in theeffortless creed of Confucius, in the Aztec coloured-string

writings and rayed stones, in the uncertain marks left of thesunken Polynesian continent, hieroglyphs as useless as those of Memphis, nothing. Nothing! They have been tried, and werefound an illusion. Think then, to-day, now looking from thisapex of the pavement promontory outwards from our own landto the utmost bounds of the farthest sail, is there any faith orculture at this hour which can stand in this fierce heat? Fromthe various forms of Semitic, Aryan, or Turanian creed now

existing, from the printing-press to the palm-leaf volume on tothose who call on the jewel in the lotus, can aught be gathered

which can face this, the Reality? The indistinguishable noise,non-resolvable, roars a loud contempt.

Turn, then, to the calm reasoning of Aristotle; is there anything in that? Can the half-divine thought of Plato, rising in storeys of sequential ideas, following each other to the conclusion, endure

here? No! All the philosophers in Diogenes Laertius fade away:the theories of medimval days; the organon of experiment;down to this hour, they are useless alike. The science of thishour, drawn from the printing-press in an endless web of paper,is powerless here; the indistinguishable noise echoed from thesmoke-shadowed walls despises the whole. A thousandfootsteps, a thousand hoofs, a thousand wheels roll over andutterly contemn them in complete annihilation. Mere illusionsof heart or mind, they are tested and thrust aside by theirresistible push of a million converging feet.

Burning in the sky, the sun shines as it shone on me in thesolitary valley, as it burned on when the earliest cave of India

was carved. Above the indistinguishable roar of the many feet Ifeel the presence of the sun, of the immense forces of theuniverse, and beyond these the sense of the eternal now, of theimmortal. Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side





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nothing further, and it is chained like a horse to an iron pin inthe ground. It is the most deadly, the most fatal poison of themind. No such casuistry has ever for a moment held me, butstill, if permitted, the constant routine of house-life, the same

work, the same thought in the work, the little circumstancesregularly recurring, will dull the keenest edge of thought. By my daily pilgrimage, I escaped from it back to the sun.

In summer the leaves of the aspen rustled pleasantly, there wasthe tinkle of falling water over a hatch, thrushes sang andblackbirds whistled, greenfinches laughed in their talk to eachother. The commonplace dusty road was commonplace nolonger. In the dust was the mark of the chaffinches' little feet;

the white light rendered even the dust brighter to look on. Theair came from the south-west, there were distant hills in thatdirection, over fields of grass and corn. As I visited the spotfrom day to day the wheat grew from green to yellow, the wildroses flowered, the scarlet poppies appeared, and again thebeeches reddened in autumn. In the march of time there fellaway from my mind, as the leaves from the trees in autumn, thelast traces and relics of superstitions and traditions acquired

compulsorily in childhood. Always feebly adhering, they finally disappeared.

There fell away, too, personal bias and prejudices, enabling meto see clearer and with wider sympathies. The glamour of modern science and discoveries faded away, for I found themno more than the first potter's wheel. Erasure and receptionproceeded together; the past accumulations of casuistry wereerased, and my thought widened to receive the idea of something beyond all previous ideas. With disbelief, belief increased. The aspiration and hope, the prayer, was the same asthat which I felt years before on the hills, only it now broadened.

Experience of life, instead of curtailing and checking my prayer,led me to reject experience altogether. As well might the horsebelieve that the road the bridle forces it to traverse every day



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encircles the earth as I believe in experience. All the experienceof the greatest city in the world could not withhold me. Irejected it wholly. I stood bare-headed before the sun, in thepresence of the earth and air, in the presence of the immenseforces of the universe. I demand that which will make me moreperfect now, this hour. London convinced me of my ownthought. That thought has always been with me, and alwaysgrows wider.

One midsummer I went out of the road into the fields, and satdown on the grass between the yellowing wheat and the greenhawthorn bushes. The sun burned in the sky, the wheat was fullof a luxuriant sense of growth, the grass high, the earth giving

its vigour to tree and leaf, the heaven blue. The vigour andgrowth, the warmth and light, the beauty and richness of itentered into me; an ecstasy of soul accompanied the delicateexcitement of the senses: the soul rose with the body. Rapt inthe fullness of the moment, I prayed there with all thatexpansion of mind and frame; no words, no definition,inexpressible desire of physical life, of soul-life, equal to andbeyond the highest imagining of my heart.

These memories cannot be placed in exact chronological order. There was a time when a weary restlessness came upon me,perhaps from too-long-continued labour. It was like a drought,a moral drought, as if I had been absent for many years fromthe sources of life and hope. The inner nature was faint, all wasdry and tasteless; I was weary for the pure, fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollable drove me tothe sea; I was so under its influence that I could not arrange thejourney so as to get the longest day. I merely started, and of course had to wait and endure much inconvenience. To get tothe sea at some quiet spot was my one thought; to do so I hadto travel farther, and from want of prearrangement it wasbetween two and three in the afternoon before I reached theend of my journey. Even then, being too much preoccupied toinquire the way, I missed the road and had to walk a long distance before coming to the shore. But I found the sea at last;



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I walked beside it in a trance away from the houses out into the wheat. he ripe corn stood up to the beach, the waves on oneside of the shingle, and the yellow wheat on the other.

There, alone, I went down to the sea. I stood where the foamcame to my feet, and looked out over the sunlit waters. Thegreat earth bearing the richness of the harvest, and its hillsgolden with corn, was at my back; its strength and firmnessunder me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was beforeme, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The lifeof the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; Itouched the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, Iopened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the

waves, my soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea'smight. Give me fullness of life like to the sea and the sun, to theearth and the air; give me fullness of physical life, mind equaland beyond their fullness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things; give me my inexpressible desire

which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea.

Then I rested, sitting by the wheat; the bank of beach wasbetween me and the sea, but the waves beat against it; the sea was there, the sea was present and at hand. By the dry wheat Irested, I did not think, I was inhaling the richness of the sea, allthe strength and depth of meaning of the sea and earth came tome again. I rubbed out some of the wheat in my hands, I took up a piece of clod and crumbled it in my fingers, it was a joy totouch it, I held my hand so that I could see the sunlight gleamon the slightly moist surface of the skin. The earth and sun

were to me like my flesh and blood, and the air of the sea life.

With all the greater existence I drew from them I prayed for abodily life equal to it, for a soul-life beyond my thought, for my inexpressible desire of more than I could shape even into idea.

There was something higher than idea, invisible to thought asair to the eye; give me bodily life equal in fullness to thestrength of earth, and sun, and sea; give me the soul- life of my



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desire. Once more I went down to the sea, touched it, and saidfarewell. So deep was the inhalation of this life that day, that itseemed to remain in me for years. This was a real pilgrimage.

Time passed away, with more labour, pleasure, and again at last,after much pain and weariness of mind, I came down again tothe sea. The circumstances were changed, it was not a hurriedglance, there were opportunities for longer thought. It matteredscarcely anything to me now whether I was alone, or whetherhouses and other people were near. Nothing could disturb my inner vision. By the sea, aware of the sun overhead, and theblue heaven, I feel that there is nothing between me and space.

This is the verge of a gulf, and a tangent from my feet goes

straight unchecked into the unknown. It is the edge of the abyssas much as if the earth were cut away in a sheer fall of eightthousand miles to the sky beneath, thence a hollow to the stars.Looking straight out is looking straight down; the eye- glancegradually departs from the sea-level, and, rising as that falls,enters the hollow of heaven. It is gazing along the face of a vastprecipice into the hollow space which is nameless.

There mystery has been placed, but realising the vast hollow yonder makes me feel that the mystery is here. I, who am hereon the verge, standing on the margin of the sky, am in themystery itself. If I let my eye look back upon me from theextreme opposite of heaven, then this spot where I stand is inthe centre of the hollow. Alone with the sea and sky, I presently feel all the depth and wonder of the unknown come back surging up around, and touching me as the foam runs to my feet. I am in it now, not to-morrow, this moment; I cannotescape from it. Though I may deceive myself with labour, yetstill I am in it; in sleep too. There is no escape from thisimmensity.

Feeling this by the sea, under the sun, my life enlarges andquickens, striving to take to itself the largeness of the heaven.

The frame cannot expand, but the soul is able to stand beforeit. No giant's body could be in proportion to the earth, but a



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little spirit is equal to the entire cosmos, to earth and ocean, sunand star-hollow. These are but a few acres to it. Were thecosmos twice as wide, the soul could run over it, and return toitself in a time so small, no measure exists to mete it. Therefore,I think the soul may sometimes find out an existence assuperior as my mind is to the dead chalk cliff.

With the great sun burning over the foam flaked sea, roofed with heaven, aware of myself, a consciousness forced on me by these things, I feel that thought must yet grow larger andcorrespond in magnitude of conception to these. But thesecannot content me, these Titanic things of sea, and sun, andprofundity; I feel that my thought is stronger than they are. I

burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the seascorches my cheek, my life is burning in me. The soul throbslike the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever hadhas satisfied my soul.



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CHAPTER VII

MY strength is not enough to fulfil my desire; if I had thestrength of the ocean, and of the earth, the burning vigour of the sun implanted in my limbs, it would hardly suffice to gratify the measureless desire of life which possesses me. I have often

walked the day long over the sward, and, compelled to pause, atlength, in my weariness, I was full of the same eagerness with

which I started. The sinews would obey no longer, but the will was the same. My frame could never take the violent exertionmy heart demanded. Labour of body was like meat and drink tome. Over the open hills, up the steep ascents, mile after mile,there was deep enjoyment in the long-drawn breath, the spring of the foot, in the act of rapid movement. Never have I hadenough of it; I wearied long before I was satisfied, and

weariness did not bring a cessation of desire; the thirst was stillthere. I rowed, I used the axe, I split tree-trunks with wedges;my arms tired, but my spirit remained fresh and chafed againstthe physical weariness. My arms were not strong enough tosatisfy me with the axe, or wedges, or oars. There was delight in

the moment, but it was not enough. I swam, and what is moredelicious than swimming? It is exercise and luxury at once. ButI could not swim far enough; I was always dissatisfied withmyself on leaving the water. Nature has not given me a greatframe, and had it done so I should still have longed for more. I

was out of doors all day, and often half the night; still I wantedmore sunshine, more air, the hours were too short. I feel thiseven more now than in the violence of early youth: the hoursare too short, the day should be sixty hours long. Slumber, too,is abbreviated and restricted; forty hours of night and sleep

would not be too much. So little can be accomplished in thelongest summer day, so little rest and new force is accumulatedin a short eight hours of sleep.

I live by the sea now; I can see nothing of it in a day; why, I dobut get a breath of it, and the sun sinks before I have wellbegun to think. Life is so little and so mean. I dream sometimes



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backwards of the ancient times. If I could have the bow of Ninus, and the earth full of wild bulls and lions, to hunt themdown, there would be rest in that. To shoot with a gun isnothing; a mere touch discharges it. Give me a bow, that I may enjoy the delight of feeling myself draw the string and thestrong wood bending, that I may see the rush of the arrow, andthe broad head bury itself deep in shaggy hide. Give me an ironmace that I may crush the savage beast and hammer him down.

A spear to thrust through with, so that I may feel the long bladeenter and the push of the shaft. The unwearied strength of Ninus to hunt unceasingly in the fierce sun. Still I should desiregreater strength and a stouter bow, wilder creatures to combat.

The intense life of the senses, there is never enough for them. I

envy Semiramis; I would have been ten times Semiramis. I envy Nero, because of the great concourse of beauty he saw. Ishould like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth,from the swart Nubian to the white and divine Greek.

Wine is pleasant and meat refreshing; but though I own withabsolute honesty that I like them, these are the least of all. Of these two only have I ever had enough. The vehemence of

exertion, the vehemence of the spear, the vehemence of sunlight and life, the insatiate desire of insatiate Semiramis, thestill more insatiate desire of love, divine and beautiful, theuncontrollable adoration of beauty, these, these: give me thesein greater abundance than was ever known to man or woman.

The strength of Hercules, the fullness of the senses, therichness of life, would not in the least impair my desire of soul-life. On the reverse, with every stronger beat of the pulse my desire of soul-life would expand. So it has ever been with me; inhard exercise, in sensuous pleasure, in the embrace of thesunlight, even in the drinking of a glass of wine, my heart hasbeen lifted the higher towards perfection of soul. Fullness of physical life causes a deeper desire of soul-life.

Let me be physically perfect, in shape, vigour, and movement.My frame, naturally slender, will not respond to labour, andincrease in proportion to effort, nor will exposure harden a



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delicate skin. It disappoints me so far, but my spirit rises withthe effort, and my thought opens. This is the only profit of frost, the pleasure of winter, to conquer cold, and to feel bracedand strengthened by that whose province it is to wither anddestroy, making of cold, life's enemy, life's renewer. The black north wind hardens the resolution as steel is tempered in ice-

water. It is a sensual joy, as sensuous as the warm embrace of the sunlight, but fullness of physical life ever brings to me amore eager desire of soul-life.

Splendid it is to feel the boat rise to the roller, or forcedthrough by the sail to shear the foam aside like a share; splendidto undulate as the chest lies on the wave, swimming, the

brimming ocean round: then I know and feel its deep strong tide, its immense fullness, and the sun glowing over; splendid toclimb the steep green hill: in these I feel myself, I drink theexquisite joy of the senses, and my soul lifts itself with them. Itis beautiful even to watch a fine horse gallop, the long stride,the rush of the wind as he passes, my heart beats quicker to thethud of the hoofs, and I feel his strength. Gladly would I havethe strength of the Tartar stallion roaming the wild steppe; that

very strength, what vehemence of soul-thought wouldaccompany it. But I should like it, too, for itself. For I believe, with all my heart, in the body and the flesh, and believe that itshould be increased and made more beautiful by every means. Ibelieve, I do more than think, I believe it to be a sacred duty,incumbent upon every one, man and woman, to add to andencourage their physical life, by exercise, and in every manner.

A sacred duty each towards himself, and each towards the whole of the human race. Each one of us should do some littlepart for the physical good of the race, health, strength, vigour.here is no harm therein to the soul: on the contrary, those whostunt their physical life are most certainly stunting their souls.

I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy,blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe inthe flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship, to see aperfect human body unveiled causes a sense of worship. The



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ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended by increase of soul beauty. The soulis the high even by gazing on beauty. Let me be fleshly perfect.

It is in myself that I desire increase, profit, and exaltation of body, mind, and soul. The surroundings, the clothes, thedwelling, the social status, the circumstances are to me utterly indifferent. Let the floor of the room be bare, let the furniturebe a plank table, the bed a mere pallet. Let the house be plainand simple, but in the midst of air and light. These are enough,a cave would be enough; in a warmer climate the open air

would suffice. Let me be furnished in myself with health, safety,strength, the perfection of physical existence; let my mind be

furnished with highest thoughts of soul-life. Let me be inmyself myself fully. The pageantry of power, the still morefoolish pageantry of wealth, the senseless precedence of place;

words fail me to express my utter contempt for such pleasureor such ambitions. Let me be in myself myself fully, and those Ilove equally so.

It is enough to lie on the sward in the shadow of green boughs,

to listen to the songs of summer, to drink in the sunlight, theair, the flowers, the sky, the beauty of all. Or upon the hill-topsto watch the white clouds rising over the curved hill-lines, theirshadows descending the slope. Or on the beach to listen to thesweet sigh as the smooth sea runs up and recedes. It is lying beside the immortals, in-drawing the life of the ocean, the earth,and the sun.

I want to be always in company with these, with earth, and sun,and sea, and stars by night. The pettiness of house-life, chairsand tables, and the pettiness of observances, the petty necessity of useless labour, useless because productive of nothing, chafeme the year through. I want to be always in company with thesun, and sea, and earth. These, and the stars by night, are my natural companions. My heart looks back and sympathises withall the joy and life of ancient time. With the circling danceburned in still attitude on the vase; with the chase and the



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hunter eagerly pursuing, whose javelin trembles to be thrown; with the extreme fury of feeling, the whirl of joy in the warriorsfrom Marathon to the last battle of Rome, not with theslaughter, but with the passion, the life in the passion; with thegarlands and the flowers; with all the breathing busts that havepanted beneath the sun. O beautiful human life! Tears come inmy eyes as I think of it. So beautiful, so inexpressibly beautiful!

So deep is the passion of life that, if it were possible to liveagain, it must be exquisite to die pushing the eager breastagainst the sword. In the flush of strength to face the sharppain joyously, and laugh in the last glance of the sun, if only tolive again, now on earth, were possible. So subtle is the chord

of life that sometimes to watch troops marching in rhythmicorder, undulating along the column as the feet are lifted, bringstears in my eyes. Yet could I have in my own heart all thepassion, the love and joy, burned in the breasts that havepanted, breathing deeply, since the hour of Ilion, yet still Ishould desire more. How willingly I would strew the paths of all with flowers; how beautiful a delight to make the worldjoyous! The song should never be silent, the dance never still,

the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever.I would submit to a severe discipline, and to go without many things cheerfully, for the good and happiness of the human racein the future. Each one of us should do something, howeversmall, towards that great end. At the present time the labour of our predecessors in this country, in all other countries of theearth, is entirely wasted. We live, that is, we snatch an existence,and our works become nothing. The piling up of fortunes, thebuilding of cities, the establishment of immense commerce,ends in a cipher. These objects are so outside my idea that Icannot understand them, and look upon the struggle inamazement. Not even the pressure of poverty can force uponme an understanding of, and sympathy with, these things. It isthe human being as the human being of whom I think. That thehuman being as the human being, nude, apart altogether frommoney, clothing, houses, properties, should enjoy greater



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health, strength, safety, beauty, and happiness, I would gladly agree to a discipline like that of Sparta. The Spartan method didproduce the finest race of men, and Sparta was famous inantiquity for the most beautiful women. So far, therefore, it fitsexactly to my ideas.

No science of modern times has yet discovered a plan to meetthe requirements of the millions who live now, no plan by

which they might attain similar physical proportion. Someincrease of longevity, some slight improvement in the generalhealth is promised, and these are great things, but far, farbeneath the ideal. Probably the whole mode of thought of thenations must be altered before physical progress is possible.

Not while money, furniture, affected show and the pageantry of wealth are the ambitions of the multitude can the multitudebecome ideal in form. When the ambition of the multitude isfixed on the ideal of form and beauty, then that ideal willbecome immediately possible, and a marked advance towards itcould be made in three generations. Glad, indeed, should I beto discover something that would help towards this end.

How pleasant it would be each day to think, To-day I havedone something that will tend to render future generationsmore happy. The very thought would make this hour sweeter.It is absolutely necessary that something of this kind should bediscovered. First, we must lay down the axiom that as yetnothing has been found; we have nothing to start with; all hasto be begun afresh. All courses or methods of human life havehitherto been failures. Some course of life is needed based onthings that are, irrespective of tradition. The physical ideal mustbe kept steadily in view.



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CHAPTER VIII

AN enumeration of the useless would almost be anenumeration of everything hitherto pursued. For instance, to goback as far as possible, the study and labour expended onEgyptian inscriptions and papyri, which contain nothing butdoubtful, because laudatory history, invocations to idols, andsimilar matters: all these labours are in vain. Take a broom andsweep the papyri away into the dust. The Assyrian terra-cottatablets, some recording fables, and some even sadder, contractsbetween men whose bodies were dust twenty centuries since,take a hammer and demolish them. Set a battery to beat downthe pyramids, and a mind-battery to destroy the deadening influence of tradition. The Greek statue lives to this day, andhas the highest use of all, the use of true beauty. The Greek andRoman philosophers have the value of furnishing the mind

with material to think from. Egyptian and Assyrian, mediaevaland eighteenth-century culture, miscalled, are all alike meredust, and absolutely useless.

There is a mass of knowledge so called at the present day equally useless, and nothing but an encumbrance. We are forcedby circumstances to become familiar with it, but the timeexpended on it is lost. No physical ideal, far less any soul- ideal,

will ever be reached by it. In a recent generation erudition in thetext of the classics was considered the most honourable of pursuits; certainly nothing could be less valuable. In our owngeneration, another species of erudition is lauded, erudition inthe laws of matter, which, in itself, is but one degree better. Thestudy of matter for matter's sake is despicable; if any can turnthat study to advance the ideal of life, it immediately becomesmost valuable. But not without the human ideal. It is nothing tome if the planets revolve around the sun, or the sun around theearth, unless I can thereby gather an increase of body or mind.

As the conception of the planets revolving around the sun, thepresent astronomical conception of the heavens, is distinctly grander than that of Ptolemy, it is therefore superior, and a gain



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to the human mind. So with other sciences, not immediately useful, yet if they furnish the mind with material of thought,they are an advance.

But not in themselves, only in conjunction with the humanideal. Once let that slip out of the thought, and science is of nomore use than the invocations in the Egyptian papyri. The

world would be the gainer if the Nile rose and swept away pyramid and tomb, sarcophagus, papyri, and inscription; for itseems as if most of the superstitions which still to this hour, inour own country, hold minds in their sway, originated in Egypt.

The world would be the gainer if a Nile flood of new thoughtarose and swept away the past, concentrating the effort of all

the races of the earth upon man's body, that it might reach anideal of shape, and health, and happiness.

Nothing is of any use unless it gives me a stronger body andmind, a more beautiful body, a happy existence, and a soul-lifenow. The last phase of philosophy is equally useless with therest. The belief that the human mind was evolved, in theprocess of unnumbered years, from a fragment of palpitating

slime through a thousand gradations, is a modern superstition,and proceeds upon assumption alone.

Nothing is evolved, no evolution takes place, there is no recordof such an event; it is pure assertion. The theory fascinatesmany, because they find, upon study of physiology, that thegradations between animal and vegetable are so fine and soclose together, as if a common web bound them together. Butalthough they stand so near they never change places. They arelike the figures on the face of a clock; there are minute dotsbetween, apparently connecting each with the other, and thehands move round over all. Yet ten never becomes twelve, andeach second even is parted from the next, as you may hear by listening to the beat. So the gradations of life, past and present,though standing close together never change places. Nothing isevolved. There is no evolution any more than there is any design in nature. By standing face to face with nature, and not



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from books, I have convinced myself that there is no designand no evolution. What there is, what was the cause, how and

why, is not yet known; certainly it was neither of these.

But it may be argued the world must have been created, or itmust have been made of existing things, or it must have beenevolved, or it must have existed for ever, through all eternity. Ithink not. I do not think that either of these are "musts," northat any "must" has yet been discovered; not even that there"must" be a first cause. There may be other things, otherphysical forces even, of which we know nothing. I strongly suspect there are. There may be other ideas altogether fromany we have hitherto had the use of. For many ages our ideas

have been confined to two or three. We have conceived theidea of creation, which is the highest and grandest of all, if nothistorically true; we have conceived the idea of design, that is of an intelligence making order and revolution of chaos; and wehave conceived the idea of evolution by physical laws of matter,

which, though now so much insisted on, is as ancient as theGreek philosophers. But there may be another alternative; Ithink there are other alternatives.

Whenever the mind obtains a wider view we may find thatorigin. for instance, is not always due to what is understood by cause. At this moment the mind is unable to conceive of anything happening, or of anything coming into existence,

without a cause. From cause to effect is the sequence of ourideas. But I think that if at some time we should obtain analtogether different and broader sequence of ideas, we may discover that there are various other alternatives. As the world,and the universe at large, was not constructed according toplan, so it is clear that the sequence or circle of ideas whichincludes plan, and cause, and effect, are not in the circle of ideas

which would correctly explain it. Put aside the plan-circle of ideas, and it will at once be evident that there is no inherentnecessity or "must." There is no inherent necessity for a firstcause, or that the world and the universe was created, or that it

was shaped of existing matter, or that it evolved itself and its



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inhabitants, or that the cosmos has existed in varying forms forever. There may be other alternatives altogether. The only idea Ican give is the idea that there is another idea.

In this "must", "it must follow", lies my objection to the logicof science. The arguments proceed from premises toconclusions, and end with the assumption "it thereforefollows." But I say that, however carefully the argument be builtup, even though apparently flawless, there is no such thing atpresent as "it must follow." Human ideas at present naturally form a plan, and a balanced design; they might be indicated by ageometrical figure, an upright straight line in the centre, andbranching from that straight line curves on either hand exactly

equal to each other. In drawing that is how we are taught, tobalance the outline or curves on one side with the curves on theother. In nature and in fact there is no such thing. The stem of a tree represents the upright line, but the branches do notbalance; those on one side are larger or longer than those onthe other. Nothing is straight, but all things curved, crooked,and unequal.

The human body is the most remarkable instance of inequality,lack of balance, and want of plan. The exterior is beautiful in itslines, but the two hands, the two feet, the two sides of the face,the two sides of the profile, are not precisely equal. The very nails of the fingers are set ajar, as it were, to the lines of thehand, and not quite straight. Examination of the interior organsshows a total absence of balance. The heart is not in the centre,nor do the organs correspond in any way. The viscera are

wholly opposed to plan. Coming, lastly, to the bones, thesehave no humanity, as it were, of shape; they are neither roundnor square; the first sight of them causes a sense of horror, soextra-human are they in shape; there is no balance of design inthem. These are very brief examples, but the whole universe, sofar as it can be investigated, is equally unequal. No straight lineruns through it, with balanced curves each side.



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Let this thought now be carried into the realms of thought. The mind, or circle, or sequence of ideas, acts, or thinks, orexists in a balance, or what seems a balance to it. Astraight line of thought is set in the centre, with equal brancheseach side, and with a generally rounded outline. But thiscorresponds to nothing in tangible fact. Hence I think, by analogy, we may suppose that neither does it correspond to thecircle of ideas which caused us and all things to be, or, at allevents, to the circle of ideas which accurately understand us andall things. There are other ideas altogether. From standing faceto face so long with the real earth, the real sun, and the real sea,I am firmly convinced that there is an immense range of thought quite unknown to us yet.

The problem of my own existence also convinces me that thereis much more. The questions are: Did my soul exist before my body was formed? Or did it come into life with my body, as aproduct, like a flame, of combustion? What will become of itafter death? Will it simply go out like a flame and become non-existent, or will it live for ever in one or other mode? To thesequestions I am unable to find any answer whatsoever. In our

present range of ideas there is no reply to them. I may havepreviously existed; I may not have previously existed. I may bea product of combustion; I may exist on after physical life issuspended, or I may not. No demonstration is possible. But

what I want to say is that the alternatives of extinction orimmortality may not be the only alternatives. There may besomething else, more wonderful than immortality, and farbeyond and above that idea. There may be something immeasurably superior to it. As our ideas have run in circles forcenturies, it is difficult to find words to express the idea thatthere are other ideas. For myself, though I cannot fully expressmyself, I feel fully convinced that there is a vast immensity of thought, of existence, and of other things beyond evenimmortal existence.



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CHAPTER IX

IN human affairs everything happens by chance, that is, indefiance of human ideas, and without any direction of anintelligence. A man bathes in a pool, a crocodile seizes andlacerates his flesh. If any one maintains that an intelligencedirected that cruelty, I can only reply that his mind is under anillusion. A man is caught by a revolving shaft and torn topieces, limb from limb. There is no directing intelligence inhuman affairs, no protection, and no assistance. Those who actuprightly are not rewarded, but they and their children often

wander in the utmost indigence. Those who do evil are notalways punished, but frequently flourish and have happy children. Rewards and punishments are purely humaninstitutions, and if government be relaxed they entirely disappear. No intelligence whatever interferes in human affairs.

There is a most senseless belief now prevalent that effort, and work, and cleverness, perseverance and industry, are invariably successful. Were this the case, every man would enjoy acompetence, at least, and be free from the cares of money. This

is an illusion almost equal to the superstition of a directing intelligence, which every fact and every consideration disproves.

How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertionthat all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end,and are ordered by a humane intelligence! It is the most utterfalsehood and a crime against the human race. Even in my brief time I have been contemporary with events of the mosthorrible character; as when the mothers in the Balkans casttheir own children from the train to parish in the snow; as whenthe Princess Alice foundered, and six hundred human beings

were smothered in foul water; as when the hecatomb of twothousand maidens were burned in the church at Santiago; as

when the miserable creatures tore at the walls of the Viennatheatre. Consider only the fates which overtake the littlechildren. Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful thatI can hardly write of it. I could not go into hospitals and face it,



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as some do, lest my mind should be temporarily overcome. The whole and the worst the worst pessimist can say is far beneaththe least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man.It is the duty of all rational beings to acknowledge the truth.

There is not the least trace of directing intelligence in humanaffairs. This is a foundation of hope, because, if the presentcondition of things were ordered by a superior power, there

would be no possibility of improving it for the better in thespite of that power. Acknowledging that no such directionexists, all things become at once plastic to our will.

The credit given by the unthinking to the statement that allaffairs are directed has been the bane of the world since the

days of the Egyptian papyri and the origin of superstition. Solong as men firmly believe that everything is fixed for them, solong is progress impossible. If you argue yourself into the belief that you cannot walk to a place, you cannot walk there. But if you start you can walk there easily. Any one who will considerthe affairs of the world at large, and of the individual, will seethat they do not proceed in the manner they would do for ourown happiness if a man of humane breadth of view were placed

at their head with unlimited power, such as is credited to theintelligence which does not exist. A man of intellect andhumanity could cause everything to happen in an infinitely superior manner. Could one like the divine Julius, humane,generous, broadest of view, deep thinking, wield such power,certainly every human being would enjoy happiness.

But that which is thoughtlessly credited to a non-existentintelligence should really be claimed and exercised by thehuman race. It is ourselves who should direct our affairs,protecting ourselves from pain, assisting ourselves, succouring and rendering our lives happy. We must do for ourselves whatsuperstition has hitherto supposed an intelligence to do for us.Nothing whatsoever is done for us. We are born naked, and noteven protected by a shaggy covering. Nothing is done for us.

The first and strongest command (using the word to convey theidea only) that nature, the universe, our own bodies give, is to



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do everything for ourselves. The sea does not make boats forus, nor the earth of her own will build us hospitals. The injuredlie bleeding, and no invisible power lifts them up. The maidens

were scorched in the midst of their devotions, and their remainsmake a mound hundreds of yards long. The infants perished inthe snow, and the ravens tore their limbs. Those in the theatrecrushed each other to the death, agony. For how long, for how many thousand years, must the earth and the sea, and the fireand the air, utter these things and force them upon us beforethey are admitted in their full significance?

These things speak with a voice of thunder. From every humanbeing whose body has been racked by pain; from every human

being who has suffered from accident or disease; from every human being drowned, burned, or slain by negligence, theregoes up a continually increasing cry louder than the thunder. Anawe-inspiring cry dread to listen to, which no one dares listento, against which ears are stopped by the wax of superstitionand the wax of criminal selfishness:, These miseries are yourdoing, because you have mind and though, and could haveprevented them. You can prevent them in the future. You do

not even try.It is perfectly certain that all diseases without exception arepreventable, or, if not so, that they can be so weakened as to dono harm. It is perfectly certain that all accidents are preventable;there is not one that does not arise from folly or negligence. Allaccidents are crimes. It is perfectly certain that all human beingsare capable of physical happiness. It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being isattainable to the exclusion of deformities. It is incontrovertiblethat there is no necessity for any man to die but of old age, andthat if death cannot be prevented life can be prolonged farbeyond the farthest now known. It is incontrovertible that atthe present time no one ever dies of old age. Not one singleperson ever dies of old age, or of natural causes, for there is nosuch thing as a natural cause of death. They die of disease or

weakness which is the result of disease either in themselves or



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in their ancestors. No such thing as old age is known to us. Wedo not even know what old age would be like, because no oneever lives to it.

Our bodies are full of unsuspected flaws, handed down it may be for thousands of years, and it is of these that we die, and notof natural decay. Till these are eliminated, or as nearly eliminated as possible, we shall never even know what true oldage is like, nor what the true natural limit of human life is. Theutmost limit now appears to be about one hundred and fiveyears, but as each person who has got so far has died of

weaknesses inherited through thousands of years, it isimpossible to say to what number of years he would have

reached in a natural state. It seems more than possible that trueold age, the slow and natural decay of the body apart frominherited flaw, would be free from very many, if not all, of thepetty miseries which now render extreme age a doubtfulblessing. If the limbs grew weaker they would not totter; if theteeth dropped it would not be till the last; if the eyes were lessstrong they would not be quite dim; nor would the mind lose itsmemory.

But now we see eyes become dim and artificial aid needed incomparative youth, and teeth drop out in mere childhood.Many men and women lose teeth before they are twenty. Thissimple fact is evidence enough of inherited weakness or flaw.How could a person who had lost teeth before twenty be eversaid to die of old age, though he died at a hundred and ten?Death is not a supernatural event; it is an event of the mostmaterialistic character, and may certainly be postponed, by theunited efforts of the human race, to a period far more distantfrom the date of birth than has been the case during the historicperiod. The question has often been debated in my mind

whether death is or is not wholly preventable; whether, if theentire human race were united in their efforts to eliminatecauses of decay, death might not also be altogether eliminated.



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If we consider ourselves by the analogy of animals, trees, andother living creatures, the reply is that, however postponed, inlong process of time the tissues must wither. Suppose an idealman, free from inherited flaw, then though his age might beprolonged to several centuries, in the end the natural body must

wear out. That is true so far. But it so happens that the analogy is not just, and therefore the conclusions it points to are nottenable.

Man is altogether different from every other animal, every otherliving creature known. He is different in body. In his purely natural state, in his true natural state, he is immeasurably stronger. No animal approaches to the physical perfection of

which a man is capable. He can weary the strongest horse, hecan outrun the swiftest stag, he can bear extremes of heat andcold hunger and thirst, which would exterminate every knownliving thing. Merely in bodily strength he is superior to all. Thestories of antiquity, which were deemed fables, may be fableshistorically, but search has shown that they are not intrinsically fables. Man of flesh and blood is capable of all that Ajax, allthat Hercules did. Feats in modern days have surpassed these,

as when Webb swam the Channel; mythology contains nothing equal to that. The difference does not end here. Animals think to a certain extent, but if their conceptions be ever so clever,not having hands they cannot execute them.

I myself maintain that the mind of man is practically infinite. Itcan understand anything brought before it. It has not the powerof its own motion to bring everything before it, but whenanything is brought it is understood. It is like sitting in a room

with one window; you cannot compel everything to pass the window, but whatever does pass is seen. It is like a magnifying glass, which magnifies and explains everything brought into itsfocus. The mind of man is infinite. Beyond this, man has a soul.I do not use this word in the common sense whichcircumstances have given to it. I use it as the only term toexpress that inner consciousness which aspires. These brief reasons show that the analogy is imperfect, and that therefore,



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although an ideal animal, a horse, a dog, a lion, must die, it doesnot follow that an ideal man must. He has a body possessed of exceptional recuperative powers, which, under properconditions, continually repairs itself. He has a mind by which hecan select remedies, and select his course and carefully restorethe waste of tissue. He has a soul, as yet, it seems to me, lying inabeyance, by the aid of which he may yet discover things now deemed supernatural.

Considering these things I am obliged by facts andincontrovertible argument to conclude that death is notinevitable to the ideal man. He is shaped for a species of physical immortality. The beauty of form of the ideal human

being indicates immortality, the contour, the curve, the outlineanswer to the idea of life. In the course of ages united effortlong continued may eliminate those causes of decay which havegrown up in ages past, and after that has been done advancefarther and improve the natural state. As a river brings downsuspended particles of sand, and depositing them at its mouthforms a delta and a new country; as the air and the rain and theheat of the sun desiccate the rocks and slowly wear down

mountains into sand, so the united action of the human race,continued through centuries, may build up the ideal man and woman. Each individual labouring in his day through geologicaltime in front must produce an effect. The instance of Sparta,

where so much was done in a few centuries, is almost proof of it.

The truth is, we die through our ancestors; we are murdered by our ancestors. Their dead hands stretch forth from the tomband drag us down to their mouldering bones. We in our turnare now at this moment preparing death for our unbornposterity. This day those that die do not die in the sense of oldage, they are slain. Nothing has been accumulated for ourbenefit in ages past. All the labour and the toil of so many millions continued through such vistas of time, down to thosemillions who at this hour are rushing to and fro in London, hasaccumulated nothing for us. Nothing for our good. The only



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things that have been stored up have been for our evil anddestruction, diseases and weaknesses crossed and cultivated andrendered almost part and parcel of our very bones. Now let usbegin to roll back the tide of death, and to set our faces steadily to a future of life. It should be the sacred and sworn duty of every one, once at least during lifetime, to do something inperson towards this end. It would be a delight and pleasure tome to do something every day, were it ever so minute. Toreflect that another human being, if at a distance of tenthousand years from the year 1883, would enjoy one hour'smore life, in the sense of fullness of life, in consequence of anything I had done in my little span, would be to me a peaceof soul.



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CHAPTER X

UNITED effort through geological time in front is but thebeginning of an idea. I am convinced that much more can bedone, and that the length of time may be almost immeasurably shortened. The general principles that are now in operation areof the simplest and most elementary character, yet they havealready made considerable difference. I am not content withthese. There must be much more, there must be things whichare at present unknown by whose aid advance may be made.Research proceeds upon the same old lines and runs in theancient grooves. Further, it is restricted by the ultra-practical

views which are alone deemed reasonable. But there should beno limit placed on the mind. The purely ideal is as worthy of pursuit as the practical, and the mind is not to be pinned todogmas of science any more than to dogmas of superstition.Most injurious of all is the continuous circling on the samepath, and it is from this that I wish to free my mind.

The pursuit of theory, the organon of pure thought, has led

incidentally to great discoveries, and for myself I am convincedit is of the highest value. The process of experiment hasproduced much, and has applied what was previously found.Empiricism is worthy of careful re-working out, for it is a factthat most things are more or less empirical, especially inmedicine. Denial may be given to this statement, nevertheless itis true, and I have had practical exemplification of it in my ownexperience. Observation is perhaps more powerful an organonthan either experiment or empiricism. If the eye is always

watching, and the mind on the alert, ultimately chance suppliesthe solution.

The difficulties I have encountered have generally been solvedby chance in this way. When I took an interest in archaeologicalmatters, an interest long since extinct, I considered that a partof an army known to have marched in a certain direction during the Civil War must have visited a town in which I was



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interested. But I exhausted every mode of research in vain;there was no evidence of it. If the knowledge had ever existed ithad dropped again. Some years afterwards, when my interesthad ceased, and I had put such inquiries for ever aside (being useless, like the Egyptian papyri), I was reading in the BritishMuseum. Presently I returned my book to the shelf, and thenslowly walked along the curving wall lined with volumes,looking to see if I could light on anything to amuse me. I took out a volume for a glance; it opened of itself at a certain page,and there was the information I had so long sought, a reprint of an old pamphlet describing the visit of the army to the town inthe Civil War. So chance answered the question in the course of time.

And I think that, seeing how great a part chance plays in humanaffairs, it is essential that study should be made of chance; itseems to me that an organon from experiment. Then there isthe inner consciousness, the psyche, that has never yet beenbrought to bear upon life and its questions. Besides which thereis a super-sensuous reason. Often I have argued with myself that such and such a course was the right one to follow, while

in the intervals of thinking about it an undercurrent of unconscious impulse has desired me to do the reverse or toremain inactive. Sometimes it has happened that the supersensuous reasoning has been correct, and the most faultlessargument wrong. I presume this super sensuous reasoning,preceding independently in the mind, arises from perceptionstoo delicate for analysis. From these considerations alone I amconvinced that, by the aid of ideas yet to be discovered, thegeological time in front may be immeasurably shortened. Thesemodes of research are not all. The psyche, the soul in me, tellsme that there is much more, that these are merely beginnings of the crudest kind.

I fully recognise the practical difficulty arising from theingrained, hereditary, and unconscious selfishness which beganbefore history, and has been crossed and cultivated for twelvethousand years since. This renders me less sanguine of united



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effort through geological time ahead, unless some idea can beformed to give a stronger impulse even than selfishness, orunless the selfishness can be utilised. The complacency with

which the mass of people go about their daily task, absolutely indifferent to all other considerations, is appalling in itsconcentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong, they intendrightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race. So

wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so stolid and so complacent under the immense weight of misery, so callous to its own possibilities, and so grown to itschains, that I almost despair to see it awakened. Cemeteries areoften placed on hillsides, and the white stones are visible faroff. If the whole of the dead in a hillside cemetery were called

up alive from their tombs, and walked forth down into the valley, it would not rouse the mass of people from the densepyramid of stolidity which presses on them.

There would be gaping and marvelling and rushing about, and what then? In a week or two the ploughman would settle downto his plough, the carpenter to his bench, the smith to his anvil,the merchant to his money, and the dead come to life would be

utterly forgotten. No matter in what manner the possibilities of human life are put before the world, the crowd continues asstolid as before. Therefore nothing hitherto done, or suggested,or thought of, is of much avail; but this fact in no degree staysme from the search. On the contrary, the less there has beenaccomplished the more anxious I am; the truth it teaches is thatthe mind must be lifted out of its old grooves before anything

will be certainly begun. Erase the past from the mind, standface to face with the real now, and work out all anew. Call thesoul to our assistance; the soul tells me that outside all the ideasthat have yet occurred there are others, whole circles of others.

I remember a cameo of Augustus Caesar, the head of theemperor is graven in delicate lines, and shows the mostexquisite proportions. It is a balanced head, a head adjusted tothe calmest intellect. That head when it was living contained acircle of ideas, the largest, the widest, the most profound



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current in his time. All that philosophy had taught, all thatpractice, experiment, and empiricism had discovered, wasfamiliar to him. There was no knowledge in the ancient worldbut what was accessible to the Emperor of Rome. Now at thisday there are amongst us heads as finely proportioned as thatcut out in the cameo. Though these living men do not possessarbitrary power, the advantages of arbitrary power, as far asknowledge is concerned, are secured to them by education, by the printing-press, and the facilities of our era. It is reasonableto imagine a head of our time filled with the largest, the widest,the most profound ideas current in the age. Augustus Caesar,however great his intellect, could not in that balanced head havepossessed the ideas familiar enough to the living head of this

day. As we have a circle of ideas unknown to Augustus Caesar,so I argue there are whole circles of ideas unknown to us. It isthese that I am so earnestly desirous of discovering.

For nothing has as yet been of any value, however good itsintent. There is no virtue, or reputed virtue, which has not beenrigidly pursued, and things have remained as before. Men and

women have practised self-denial, and to what end? They have

compelled themselves to suffer hunger and thirst; in vain. They have clothed themselves in sack cloth and lacerated the flesh. They have mutilated themselves. Some have been scrupulous tobathe, and some have been scrupulous to cake their bodies withthe foulness of years. Many have devoted their lives to assistothers in sickness or poverty. Chastity has been faithfully observed, chastity both of body and mind. Self-examination hasbeen pursued till it ended in a species of sacred insanity, and allthese have been of no more value than the tortures undergoneby the Indian mendicant who hangs himself up by a hook through his back. All these are pure folly.

Asceticism has not improved the form, or the physical well-being, or the heart of any human being. On the contrary, thehetaira is often the warmest hearted and the most generous.Casuistry and self-examination are perhaps the most injuriousof all the virtues, utterly destroying independence of mind. Self-



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denial has had no result, and all the self-torture of centuries hasbeen thrown away. Lives spent in doing good have been livesnobly wasted. Everything is in vain. The circle of ideas wepossess is too limited to aid us. We need ideas as far outside ourcircle as ours are outside those that were pondered over by

Augustus Caesar.

The most extraordinary spectacle, as it seems to me, is the vastexpenditure of labour and time wasted in obtaining meresubsistence. As a man, in his lifetime, works hard and savesmoney, that his children may be free from the cares of penury and may at least have sufficient to eat, drink, clothe, and roof them, so the generations that preceded us might, had they so

chosen, have provided for our subsistence. The labour and timeof ten generations, properly directed, would sustain a hundredgenerations succeeding to them, and that, too, with so little self-denial on the part of the providers as to be scarcely felt. So mennow, in this generation, ought clearly to be laying up a store, or,

what is still more powerful, arranging and organising that thegenerations which follow may enjoy comparative freedom fromuseless labour. Instead of which, with transcendent

improvidence, the world works only for to-day, as the world worked twelve thousand years ago, and our children's children will still have to toil and slave for the bare necessities of life. This is, indeed an extraordinary spectacle.

That twelve thousand written years should have elapsed, andthe human race, able to reason and to think, and easily capableof combination in immense armies for its own destruction,should still live from hand to mouth, like cattle and sheep, likethe animals of the field and the birds of the woods; that thereshould not even be roofs to cover the children born, unlessthose children labour and expend their time to pay for them;that there should not be clothes, unless, again, time and labourare expended to procure them; that there should not be evenfood for the children of the human race, except they labour astheir fathers did twelve thousand years ago; that even watershould scarce be accessible to them, unless paid for by labour!



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In twelve thousand written years the world has not yet builtitself a House, nor filled a Granary, nor organised itself for itsown comfort. It is so marvellous I cannot express the wonder

with which it fills me. And more wonderful still, if that couldbe, there are people so infatuated, or, rather, so limited of view,that they glory in this state of things, declaring that work is themain object of man's existence, work for subsistence, andglorying in their wasted time. To argue with such is impossible;to leave them is the only resource.

This our earth this day produces sufficient for our existence. This our earth produces not only a sufficiency, but asuperabundance, and pours a cornucopia of good things down

upon us. Further, it produces sufficient for stores and granariesto be filled to the rooftree for years ahead. I verily believe thatthe earth in one year produces enough food to last for thirty.

Why, then, have we not enough? Why do people die of starvation, or lead a miserable existence on the verge of it? Why have millions upon millions to toil from morning to evening just to gain a mere crust of bread? Because of the absolute lack of Organisation by which such labour should produce its effect,

the absolute lack of distribution, the absolute lack even of the very idea that such things are possible. Nay, even to mentionsuch things, to say that they are possible, is criminal with many.Madness could hardly go farther.

That selfishness has all to do with it I entirely deny. The humanrace for ages upon ages has been enslaved by ignorance and by interested persons whose object it has been to confine theminds of men, thereby doing more injury than if with infectedhands they purposely imposed disease on the heads of thepeople. Almost worse than these, and at the present day asinjurious, are those persons incessantly declaring, teaching, andimpressing upon all that to work is man's highest condition.

This falsehood is the interested superstition of an age infatuated with money, which having accumulated it cannot even expendit in pageantry. It is a falsehood propagated for the doubtfulbenefit of two or three out of ten thousand, It is the lie of a



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morality founded on money only, and utterly outside andhaving no association whatever with the human being in itself.Many superstitions have been got rid of in these days; time it isthat this, the last and worst, were eradicated.

At this hour, out of thirty-four millions who inhabit thiscountry, two-thirds, say twenty-two millions, live within thirty years of that abominable institution the poorhouse. That any human being should dare to apply to another the epithet"pauper" is, to me, the greatest, the vilest, the mostunpardonable crime that could be committed. Each humanbeing, by mere birth, has a birthright in this earth and all itsproductions; and if they do not receive it, then it is they who

are injured, and it is not the "pauper", oh, inexpressibly wicked word!, it is the well-to-do, who are the criminal classes. Itmatters not in the least if the poor be improvident, or drunken,or evil in any way. Food and drink, roof and clothes, are theinalienable right of every child born into the light. If the worlddoes not provide it freely, not as a grudging gift but as a right,as a son of the house sits down to breakfast, then is the worldmad. But the world is not mad, only in ignorance, an interested

ignorance, kept up by strenuous exertions, from which infernaldarkness it will, in course of time, emerge, marvelling at the pastas a man wonders at and glories in the light who has escapedfrom blindness.



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CHAPTER XI

This our earth produces not only a sufficiency asuperabundance, but in one year pours a cornucopia of goodthings forth, enough to fill us for many years in succession. Theonly reason we do not enjoy it is the want of rationalorganisation. I know, of course, and all who think know, thatsome labour or supervision will always necessary, since theplough must travel the furrow and the seed must be sown; but Imaintain that a tenth, nay, a hundredth, part of the labour andslavery now gone through will be sufficient, and that in thecourse of time, as organisation perfects itself and discoveriesadvance, even that part will diminish. For the rise and fall of thetides alone furnish forth sufficient power to do automatically allthe labour that is done on the earth. Is ideal man, then, to beidle? I answer that, if so, I see no wrong, but a great good. Ideny altogether that idleness is an evil, or that it produces evil,and I am well aware why the interested are so bitter againstidleness, namely, because it gives time for thought, and if menhad time to think their reign would come to an end. Idleness,

that is, the absence of the necessity to work for subsistence, is agreat good.

I hope succeeding generations will be able to be ideal. I hopethat nine-tenths of their time will be leisure time; that they may enjoy their days, and the earth, and the beauty of this beautiful

world; that they may rest by the sea and dream; that they may dance and sing, and eat and drink. I will work towards that end

with all my heart. If employment they must have, and therestlessness of the mind will insure that some will be followed,then they will find scope enough in the perfection of theirphysical frames, in the expansion of the mind, and in theenlargement of the soul. They shall not work for bread, but fortheir souls. I am willing to divide and share all I shall ever havefor this purpose, though I think the end will rather be gained by organisation than by sharing alone.



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In these material things, too, I think that we require anothercircle of ideas, and I believe that such ideas are possible, and, ina manner of speaking, exist. Let me exhort every one to dotheir utmost to think outside and beyond our present circle of ideas. For every idea gained is a hundred years of slavery remitted. Even with the idea of organisation which promisesmost I am not satisfied, but endeavour to get beyond andoutside it, so that the time now necessary may be shortened.Besides which, I see that many of our difficulties arise fromobscure and remote causes, obscure like the shape of bones, for

whose strange curves there is no familiar term. We mustendeavour to understand the crookedness and unfamiliar curvesof the conditions of life. Beyond that still there are other ideas.

Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but alwaysbe certain that a wider one is still possible. For my thought islike a hyperbola that continually widens ascending.

For grief there is no known consolation. It is useless to fill ourhearts with bubbles. A loved one gone is gone, and as to thefuture, even if there is a future, it is unknown. To assureourselves otherwise is to soothe the mind with illusions; the

bitterness of it is inconsolable. The sentiments of trust chippedout on tombstones are touching instances of the innategoodness of the human heart, which naturally longs for good,and sighs itself to sleep in the hope that, if parted, the parting isfor the benefit of those that are gone. But these inscriptions arealso awful instances of the deep intellectual darkness whichpresses still on the minds of men. The least thought erasesthem. There is no consolation. There is no relief. There is nohope certain; the whole system is a mere illusion. I, who hopeso much, and am so rapt up in the soul, know full well thatthere is no certainty.

The tomb cries aloud to us, its dead silence presses on the drumof the ear like thunder, saying, Look at this, and erase yourillusions; now know the extreme value of human life; reflect onthis and strew human life with flowers; save every hour for thesunshine; let your labour be so ordered that in future times the



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loved ones may dwell longer with those who love them; openyour minds; exalt your souls; widen the sympathies of yourhearts; face the things that are now as you will face the reality of death; make joy real now to those you love, and help forwardthe joy of those yet to be born. Let these facts force the mindand the soul to the increase of thought, and the consequentremission of misery; so that those whose time it is to die may have enjoyed all that is possible in life. Lift up your mind andsee now in this bitterness of parting, in this absence of certainty, the fact that there is no directing intelligence;remember that this death is not of old age, which no one living in the world has ever seen; remember that old age is possible,and perhaps even more than old age; and beyond these earthly

things-what? None know. But let us, turning away from theillusion of a directing intelligence, look earnestly for something better than a god, seek for something higher than prayer, andlift our souls to be with the more than immortal now.

A river runs itself clear during the night, and in sleep thoughtbecomes pellucid. All the hurrying to and fro, the unrest andstress, the agitation and confusion subside. Like a sweet pure

spring, thought pours forth to meet the light, and is illuminedto its depths. The dawn at my window ever causes a desire forlarger thought, the recognition of the light at the moment of

waking kindles afresh the wish for a broad day of the mind. There is a certainty that there are yet ideas further, and greater,that there is still a limitless beyond. I know at that moment thatthere is no limit to the things that may be yet in material andtangible shape besides the immaterial perceptions of the soul.

The dim white light of the dawn speaks it. This prophet whichhas come with its wonders to the bedside of every human being for so many thousands of years faces me once again with theupheld finger of light. Where is the limit to that physical sign?

From space to the sky, from the sky to the hills, and the sea; toevery blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to themillion waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a motein that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow



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streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between thefir-trees, and particles rise and fall within, and cross it while theair each side seems void. Through the heavens a beam slants,and we are aware of the star-stratum in which our earth moves.But what may be without that stratum? Certainly it is not a

void. This light tells us much, but I think in the course of timeyet more delicate and subtle mediums than light may be found,and through these we shall see into the shadows of the sky.

When will it be possible to be certain that the capacity of asingle atom has been exhausted? At any moment somefortunate incident may reveal a fresh power. One by one thepowers of light have been unfolded.

After thousands of years the telescope opened the stars, theprism analysed the substance of the sun, the microscopeshowed the minute structure of the rocks and the tissues of living bodies. The winged men on the Assyrian bas-reliefs, thegods of the Nile, the chariot-borne immortals of Olympus, notthe greatest of imagined beings ever possessed in fanciedattributes one-tenth the power of light. As the swallows twitter,

the dim white finger appears at my window full of wonders,such as all the wise men in twelve thousand precedent yearsnever even hoped to conceive. But this is not all, light is not all;light conceals more than it reveals; light is the darkest shadow of the sky; besides light there are many other mediums yet to beexplored. For thousands of years the sunbeams poured on theearth, full as now of messages, and light is not a hidden thing tobe searched out with difficulty. Full in the faces of men the rayscame with their intelligence from the sun when the papyri werepainted beside the ancient Nile, but they were not understood.

This hour, rays or undulations of more subtle mediums aredoubtless pouring on us over the wide earth, unrecognised, andfull of messages and intelligence from the unseen. Of these weare this day as ignorant as those who painted the papyri were of light. There is an infinity of knowledge yet to be known, andbeyond that an infinity of thought. No mental instrument even



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has yet been invented by which researches can be carried directto the object. Whatever has been found has been discovered by fortunate accident; in looking for one thing another has beenchanced on. A reasoning process has yet to be invented by

which to go straight to the desired end. For now the slightestparticle is enough to throw the search aside, and the mostminute circumstance sufficient to conceal obvious andbrilliantly shining truths. One summer evening sitting by my

window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing theposition of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk cameon, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-by, otherstars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset

which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I

must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of airblew through the branch of a pear-tree which overhung the

window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.

At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing atthe sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful starshines clearly; here a constellation is hidden by a branch; auniverse by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organon is

required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed and a real void; when to cease to look in onedirection, and to work in another. Many men of broad brow and great intellect lived in the days of ancient Greece, but forlack of the accident of a lens, and of knowing the way to use aprism, they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am in exactly theposition they were when I look beyond light. Outside my present knowledge I am exactly in their condition. I feel thatthere are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf. If any one says to himself that the telescope, and the microscope,the prism, and other discoveries have made all plain, then he isin the attitude of those ancient priests who worshipped thescarabaeus or beetle. So, too, it is with thought; outside ourpresent circle of ideas I believe there is an infinity of idea. Allthis that has been effected with light has been done by bits of glass, mere bits of shaped glass, quickly broken, and made of flint, so that by the rude flint our subtlest ideas are gained.



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Could we employ the ocean as a lens, and force truth from thesky, even then I think there would be much more beyond.

Natural things are known to us only under two conditions,matter and force, or matter and motion. A third, a fourth, afifth, no one can say how many conditions, may exist in theultra-stellar space, and such other conditions may equally existabout us now unsuspected. Something which is neither matternor force is difficult to conceive, yet, I think, it is certain thatthere are other conditions. When the mind succeeds in entering on a wider series, or circle of ideas, other conditions wouldappear natural enough. In this effort upwards I claim theassistance of the soul, the mind of the mind. The eye sees, the

mind deliberates on what it sees, the soul understands theoperation of the mind. Before a bridge is built, or a structureerected, or an interoceanic canal made, there must be a plan,and before a plan the thought in the mind. So that it is correctto say the mind bores tunnels through the mountains, bridgesthe rivers, and constructs the engines which are the pride of the

world.

This is a wonderful tool, but it is capable of work yet more wonderful in the exploration of the heavens. Now the soul isthe mind of the mind. It can build and construct and look beyond and penetrate space, and create. It is the keenest, thesharpest tool possessed by man. But what would be said if acarpenter about to commence a piece of work examined histools and deliberately cast away that with the finest edge? Suchis the conduct of those who reject the inner mind or psychealtogether. So great is the value of the soul that it seems to me,if the soul lived and received its aspirations it would not matterif the material universe melted away as snow. Many turn asidethe instant the soul is mentioned, and I sympathise with themin one sense; they fear lest, if they acknowledge it, they will befettered by mediaeval conditions. My contention is that therestrictions of the mediaeval era should entirely be cast intooblivion, but the soul recognised and employed. Instead of slurring over the soul, I desire to see it at its highest perfection.



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CHAPTER XII

SUBTLE as the mind is, it can effect little without knowledge.It cannot construct a bridge, or a building, or make a canal, or

work a problem in algebra, unless it is provided withinformation. This is obvious, and yet some say, What can youeffect by the soul? I reply because it has had no employment.Mediaeval conditions kept it in slumber: science refuses toaccept it. We are taught to employ our minds, and furnished

with materials. The mind has its logic and exercise of geometry,and thus assisted brings a great force to the solution of problems. The soul remains untaught, and can effect little.

I consider that the highest purpose of study is the education of the soul or psyche. It is said that there is no proof of theexistence of the soul, but, arguing on the same grounds, there isno proof of the existence of the mind, which is not a tangiblething. For myself, I feel convinced that there is a soul, a mindof the mind, and that it really exists. Now, glancing at the stateof wild and uneducated men, it is evident that they work with

their hands and make various things almost instinctively. But when they arrive at the idea of mind, and say to themselves, Ipossess a mind, then they think and proceed farther, forming designs and constructions both tangible and mental.

Next then, when we say, I have a soul, we can proceed to shapethings yet further, and to see deeper, and penetrate the mystery.By denying the existence and the power of the soul, refusing toemploy it, we should go back more than twelve thousand

written years of human history. But instead of this, I contend, we should endeavour to go forward, and to discover a fourthIdea, and after that a fifth, and onwards continually.

I will not permit myself to be taken captive by observing physical phenomena, as many evidently are. Some gases aremingled and produce a liquid; certainly it is worth carefulinvestigation, but it is no more than the revolution of a wheel,



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which is so often seen that it excites no surprise, though, intruth, as wonderful. So is all motion, and so is a grain of sand;there is nothing that is not wonderful; as, for instance, the factof the existence of things at all. But the intense concentrationof the mind on mechanical effects appears often to render itincapable of perceiving anything that is not mechanical. Somecompounds are observed to precipitate crystals, all of whichcontain known angles. Thence it is argued that all is mechanical,and that action occurs in set ways only. There is a tendency tolay it down as an infallible law that because we see these thingstherefore everything else that exists in space must be or moveexactly in the same manner. But I do not think that becausecrystals are precipitated with fixed angles therefore the whole

universe is necessarily mechanical. I think there are thingsexempt from mechanical rules. The restriction of thought topurely mechanical grooves blocks progress in the same way asthe restrictions of mediaeval superstition. Let the mind think,dream, imagine: let it have perfect freedom. To shut out thesoul is to put us back more than twelve thousand years.

Just as outside light, and the knowledge gained from light, there

are, I think, other mediums from which, in times to come,intelligence will be obtained, so outside the mental and thespiritual ideas we now possess I believe there exists a wholecircle of ideas. In the conception of the idea that there areothers, I lay claim to another idea.

The mind is infinite and able to understand everything that isbrought before it; there is no limit to its understanding. Thelimit is in the littleness of the things and the narrowness of theideas which have been put for it to consider. For thephilosophies of old time past and the discoveries of modernresearch are as nothing to it. They do not fill it. When they havebeen read, the mind passes on, and asks for more. The utmostof them, the whole together, make a mere nothing. Thesethings have been gathered together by immense labour, labourso great that it is a weariness to think of it; but yet, when all is



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summed up and written, the mind receives it all as easily as thehand picks flowers. It is like one sentence, read and gone.

The mind requires more, and more, and more. It is so strong that all that can be put before it is devoured in a moment. Leftto itself it will not be satisfied with an invisible idol any morethan with a wooden one. An idol whose attributes areomnipresence, omnipotence, and so on, is no greater than lightor electricity, which are present everywhere and all-powerful,and from which perhaps the thought arose. Prayer whichreceives no reply must be pronounced in vain. The mind goeson and requires more than these, something higher than prayer,something higher than a god.

I have been obliged to write these things by an irresistibleimpulse which has worked in me since early youth. They havenot been written for the sake of argument, still less for any thought of profit, rather indeed the reverse. They have beenforced from me by earnestness of heart, and they express my most serious convictions. For seventeen years they have beenlying in my mind, continually thought of and pondered over. I

was not more than eighteen when an inner and esotericmeaning began to come to me from all the visible universe, andindefinable aspirations filled me. I found them in the grassfields, under the trees, on the hill-tops, at sunrise, and in thenight. There was a deeper meaning everywhere. The sun burned

with it, the broad front of morning beamed with it; a deepfeeling entered me while gazing at the sky in the azure noon,and in the star-lit evening.

I was sensitive to all things, to the earth under, and the star-hollow round about; to the least blade of grass, to the largestoak. They seemed like exterior nerves and veins for theconveyance of feeling to me. Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me. I

was aware that in reality the feeling and the thought were in me,and not in the earth or sun; yet I was more conscious of it whenin company with these. A visit to the sea increased the strength





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outside the knowledge of the senses. Still, on the hills and by the seashore, I seek and pray deeper than ever.

The sun burns southwards over the sea and before the waveruns its shadow, constantly slipping on the advancing slope tillit curls and covers its dark image at the shore. Over the rim of the horizon waves are flowing as high and wide as those thatbreak upon the beach. These that come to me and beat thetrembling shore are like the thoughts that have been known solong; like the ancient, iterated, and reiterated thoughts that havebroken on the strand of mind for thousands of years. Beyondand over the horizon I feel that there are other waves of ideasunknown to me, flowing as the stream of ocean flows.

Knowledge of facts is limitless: they lie at my feet innumerablelike the countless pebbles; knowledge of thought socircumscribed! Ever the same thoughts come that have been

written down centuries and centuries.

Let me launch forth and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim arises over that, and again and onwards intoan ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the

strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth andrace of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all thesubtle power of the great sea, there rises an equal desire. Giveme life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts

wide as its plain; give me a soul beyond these. Sweet is thebitter sea by the shore where the faint blue pebbles are lappedby the green-grey wave, where the wind-quivering foam is loathto leave the lashed stone. Sweet is the bitter sea, and the cleargreen in which the gaze seeks the soul, looking through theglass into itself. The sea thinks for me as I listen and ponder;the sea thinks, and every boom of the wave repeats my prayer.

Sometimes I stay on the wet sands as the tide rises, listening tothe rush of the lines of foam in layer upon layer; the washswells and circles about my feet, I have my hands in it, I lift alittle in my hollowed palm, I take the life of the sea to me. My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the



strength of the sea. Or, again, the full stream of ocean beatsupon the shore, and the rich wind feeds the heart, the sunburns brightly; the sense of soul-life burns in me like a torch.

Leaving the shore I walk among the trees; a cloud passes, andthe sweet short rain comes mingled with sunbeams and flower-scented air. The finches sing among the fresh green leaves of the beeches. Beautiful it is, in summer days, to see the wheat

wave, and the long grass foam, flecked of flower yield andreturn to the wind. My soul of itself always desires; these are toit as fresh food. I have found in the hills another valley grooved in prehistoric times, where, climbing to the top of the

hollow, I can see the sea. Down in the hollow I look up; the sky stretches over, the sun burns as it seems but just above the hill,and the wind sweeps onward. As the sky extends beyond the

valley, so I know that there are ideas beyond the valley of my thought; I know that there is something infinitely higher thandeity. The great sun burning in the sky, the sea, the firm earth,all the stars of night are feeble, all, all the cosmos is feeble; it isnot strong enough to utter my prayer-desire. My soul cannot

reach to its full desire of prayer. I need no earth, or sea, or sunto think my thought. If my thought-part, the psyche, wereentirely separated from the body, and from the earth, I shouldof myself desire the same. In itself my soul desires; my existence, my soul-existence is in itself my prayer, and so long as it exists so long will it pray that I may have the fullest soul-life.

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Story of My Heart

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